research-article

BranchScope: A New Side-Channel Attack on Directional Branch Predictor

Authors:

Dmitry Evtyushkin,

Nael CSE and ECE Abu-Ghazaleh,

Dmitry PonomarevAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 53, Issue 2

Pages 693 - 707

https://doi.org/10.1145/3296957.3173204

Published: 19 March 2018 Publication History

Abstract

We present BranchScope - a new side-channel attack where the attacker infers the direction of an arbitrary conditional branch instruction in a victim program by manipulating the shared directional branch predictor. The directional component of the branch predictor stores the prediction on a given branch (taken or not-taken) and is a different component from the branch target buffer (BTB) attacked by previous work. BranchScope is the first fine-grained attack on the directional branch predictor, expanding our understanding of the side channel vulnerability of the branch prediction unit. Our attack targets complex hybrid branch predictors with unknown organization. We demonstrate how an attacker can force these predictors to switch to a simple 1-level mode to simplify the direction recovery. We carry out BranchScope on several recent Intel CPUs and also demonstrate the attack against an SGX enclave.

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Index Terms

BranchScope: A New Side-Channel Attack on Directional Branch Predictor
1. Security and privacy
  1. Security in hardware
    1. Hardware attacks and countermeasures
      1. Side-channel analysis and countermeasures
    2. Hardware reverse engineering
  2. Systems security
    1. Information flow control

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 53, Issue 2

ASPLOS '18

February 2018

809 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/3296957

Editor:
Matthew Fluet
Rodchester Institude of Technology

Issue’s Table of Contents

ASPLOS '18: Proceedings of the Twenty-Third International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems
March 2018
827 pages
ISBN:9781450349116
DOI:10.1145/3173162
General Chairs:
Xipeng Shen
North Carolina State University, USA
,
James Tuck
North Carolina State University, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Ricardo Bianchini
Microsoft Research, USA
,
Vivek Sarkar
Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

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Published: 19 March 2018

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 53, Issue 2

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https://doi.org/10.3390/fi17010032
Chen YPashrashid AWu YCarlson T(2024)Prime+Reset: Introducing A Novel Cross-World Covert-Channel Through Comprehensive Security Analysis on ARM TrustZone2024 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE)10.23919/DATE58400.2024.10546531(1-6)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.23919/DATE58400.2024.10546531
Wang HTang MXu KWang Q(2024)Cache Bandwidth Contention Leaks Secrets2024 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE)10.23919/DATE58400.2024.10546529(1-6)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.23919/DATE58400.2024.10546529
Lim HKim JLee HLuo BLiao XXu JKirda ELie D(2024)uMMU: Securing Data Confidentiality with Unobservable Memory SubsystemProceedings of the 2024 on ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3658644.3690340(2993-3007)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2024
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Li MYang YChen GYan MZhang YQuek TGao DZhou JCardenas A(2024)SoK: Understanding Design Choices and Pitfalls of Trusted Execution EnvironmentsProceedings of the 19th ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3634737.3644993(1600-1616)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
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