CS 665 Programming Assignment 1 Cache Side Channel Attack: Demonstration and Countermeasure Solved

The programming assignment is designed to ensure that you are acquainted with the working principle of CPU Cache and its related security issues. In this assignment you are going to perform side channel attack on the CPU cache and last-level cache (LLC) and to exploit its vulnerability to leak information.

 Prior to perform your own attack, you are urged to emulate “FLUSH+RELOAD” attack to get familiarized with the methodologies. The details about the attack is available in the web-link https://github.com/IAIK/cache_template_attack​ s.​ You will find FLUSH+RELOAD attacks performed over multiple applications, viz. Automated keypress profiling on “gedit”, OpenSSL AES T-table attack. 

Once you have acquired the knowledge, begin with the following task lists.

Perform​ PRIME+PROBE​ attack on L1 Dcache by running two threads in an SMT core. Mimic the similar approach used in “FLUSH+RELOAD” keypress profiling in “gedit”. You can use your own PC/laptop for the hardware framework.

 ​In ​Task A it is limited to L1 and/or L2 cache that happens to be in the same core for a particular CPU. Overcome the limitation of the attack by performing over ​LLC that is shared across multiple cores. Try attacking an application called GnuPG (version 1.4.13).

 ​Mount the ​Task B ​on the gem5 simulator. Get visualization of the attack vector and its effect on LLC latency. Also, show the cache block addresses of interest through which the information get leaked. 

 Propose a mitigation method to combat attack done in Task​ A and ​Task B​.Implement any of them.