Dynamic Eviction Set Algorithms and Their Applicability to Cache Characterisation

• Main Author: Lindqvist, Maria
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för informationsteknologi 2020
• Subjects: microarchitectural attacks; cache attacks; side channel attacks; eviction set; cache memory; Computer Engineering; Datorteknik
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-420317

Eviction sets are groups of memory addresses that map to the same cache set. They can be used to perform efficient information-leaking attacks against the cache memory, so-called cache side channel attacks. In this project, two different algorithms that find such sets are implemented and compared. The second of the algorithms improves on the first by using a concept called group testing. It is also evaluated if these algorithms can be used to analyse or reverse engineer the cache characteristics, which is a new area of application for this type of algorithms. The results show that the optimised algorithm performs significantly better than the previous state-of-the-art algorithm. This means that countermeasures developed against this type of attacks need to be designed with the possibility of faster attacks in mind. The results also shows, as a proof-of-concept, that it is possible to use these algorithms to create a tool for cache analysis.