Defeating Hardware Prefetchers in Flush+Reload Side-Channel Attack

Defeating Hardware Prefetchers in Flush+Reload Side-Channel Attack

Blog Article

Hardware prefetching can seriously interfere with Flush+Reload cache side channel attack.This interference is not taken into consideration in previous Flush+Reload attacks.In this paper, an improved Flush+Reload is provided which minimizes the impact of hardware prefetchers.

Specifically, prefetching is analyzed based on reverse U-Desks engineering and the result is used to make an evaluation model to evaluate the Small Electronic impact of hardware prefetching on Flush+Reload attacks.Then the model is applied to fine tune the placement of probes in Flush+Reload attack to mitigate the prefetching impact.The experiments show that the approach is effective on the Core i5 processor which is equipped with highly aggressive prefetchers.