Computer Scientists Unveil Novel Attacks on Cybersecurity
The team presents a proof-of-concept where they force an encryption algorithm to transiently exit earlier, resulting in the exposure of reduced-round ciphertext. Through this demonstration, they illustrate the ability to extract the secret AES encryption key.
“Pathfinder can reveal the outcome of almost any branch in almost any victim program, making it the most precise and powerful microarchitectural control-flow extraction attack that we have seen so far,” said Kazem Taram, an assistant professor of computer science at Purdue University and a UC San Diego computer science PhD graduate.
In addition to Dean Tullsen and Hosein Yavarzadeh, other UC San Diego coauthors are. Archit Agarwal and Deian Stefan. Other coauthors include Christina Garman and Kazem Taram, Purdue University; Daniel Moghimi, Google; Daniel Genkin, Georgia Tech; Max Christman and Andrew Kwong, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
This work was partially supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (FA9550- 20-1-0425); the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (W912CG-23-C-0022 and HR00112390029); the National Science Foundation (CNS-2155235, CNS-1954712, and CAREER CNS-2048262); the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship; and gifts from Intel, Qualcomm, and Cisco.
Responsible Disclosure
Researchers communicated the security findings outlined in the paper to both Intel and AMD in November 2023. Intel has informed other affected hardware/software vendors about the issues. Both Intel and AMD plan to address the concerns raised in the paper today through a Security Announcement and a Security Bulletin (AMD-SB-7015), respectively. The findings have been shared with the Vulnerability Information and Coordination Environment (VINCE), Case VU#157097: Class of Attack Primitives Enable Data Exposure on High End Intel CPUs.
