research-article

FetchBench: Systematic Identification and Characterization of Proprietary Prefetchers

Authors:

Till Schlüter,

Amit Choudhari,

Lorenz Hetterich,

Michael Schwarz,

Christian Rossow,

Nils Ole TippenhauerAuthors Info & Claims

CCS '23: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

Pages 975 - 989

https://doi.org/10.1145/3576915.3623124

Published: 21 November 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Prefetchers speculatively fetch memory using predictions on future memory use by applications. Different CPUs may use different prefetcher types, and two implementations of the same prefetcher can differ in details of their characteristics, leading to distinct runtime behavior. For a few implementations, security researchers showed through manual analysis how to exploit specific prefetchers to leak data. Identifying such vulnerabilities required tedious reverse-engineering, as prefetcher implementations are proprietary and undocumented. So far, no systematic study of prefetchers in common CPUs is available, preventing further security assessment.

In this work, we address the following question: How can we systematically identify and characterize under-specified prefetchers in proprietary processors? To answer this question, we systematically analyze approaches to prefetching, design cross-platform tests to identify and characterize prefetchers on a given CPU, and demonstrate that our implementation FetchBench can characterize prefetchers on 19 different ARM and x86-64 CPUs. For example, FetchBench uncovers and characterizes a previously unknown replay-based prefetcher on the ARM Cortex-A72 CPU. Based on these findings, we demonstrate two novel attacks that exploit this undocumented prefetcher as a side channel to leak secret information, even from the secure TrustZone into the normal world.

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Cited By

Kühn RMühlig JTeubner J(2024)How to Be Fast and Not Furious: Looking Under the Hood of CPU Cache PrefetchingProceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Data Management on New Hardware10.1145/3662010.3663451(1-10)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3662010.3663451

Index Terms

FetchBench: Systematic Identification and Characterization of Proprietary Prefetchers
1. Security and privacy
  1. Security in hardware
    1. Hardware attacks and countermeasures
      1. Side-channel analysis and countermeasures

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cover image ACM Conferences

CCS '23: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

November 2023

3722 pages

ISBN:9798400700507

DOI:10.1145/3576915

General Chairs:
Weizhi Meng
Technical University of Denmark
,
Christian D. Jensen
Technical University of Denmark
,
Program Chairs:
Cas Cremers
CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
,
Engin Kirda
Khoury College of Computer Sciences

Copyright © 2023 ACM.

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Published: 21 November 2023

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Cited By

Kühn RMühlig JTeubner J(2024)How to Be Fast and Not Furious: Looking Under the Hood of CPU Cache PrefetchingProceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Data Management on New Hardware10.1145/3662010.3663451(1-10)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3662010.3663451

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