• Killing_Spark@feddit.de
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    9 months ago

    So the attack is (very basically, if I understand correctly)

    Setup:

    • I control at least one process on the machine I am targeting another process on
    • I can send data to the target process and the process will decrypt that

    Attack:

    • I send data that in some intermediate state of decryption will look like a pointer
    • This “pointer” contains some information about the secret key I am trying to steal
    • The prefetcher does it’s thing loading the data “pointed to” in the cache
    • I can observe via a cache side channel what the prefetcher did, giving me this “pointer” containing information about the secret key
    • Repeat until I have gathered enough information about the secret key

    Is this somewhat correct? Those speculative execution vulnerabilities always make my brain hurt a little