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

ASPLOS '18: Proceedings of the Twenty-Third International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems

Pages 693 - 707

https://doi.org/10.1145/3173162.3173204

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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cover image ACM Conferences

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

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

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

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Published: 19 March 2018

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March 24 - 28, 2018

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Jiang QWang CBalzarotti DXu W(2024)Sync+SyncProceedings of the 33rd USENIX Conference on Security Symposium10.5555/3698900.3699088(3349-3366)Online publication date: 14-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3698900.3699088
Chen BWang YShome PFletcher CKohlbrenner DPaccagnella RGenkin DBalzarotti DXu W(2024)GoFetchProceedings of the 33rd USENIX Conference on Security Symposium10.5555/3698900.3698963(1117-1134)Online publication date: 14-Aug-2024
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Wiebing STron ABos HGiuffrida CBalzarotti DXu W(2024)InSpectre gadgetProceedings of the 33rd USENIX Conference on Security Symposium10.5555/3698900.3698933(577-594)Online publication date: 14-Aug-2024
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