CacheZoom: How SGX Amplifies The Power of Cache Attacks
Ahmad Moghimi, Gorka Irazoqui, Thomas Eisenbarth

TL;DR
CacheZoom demonstrates a high-precision cache side-channel attack on Intel SGX, enabling practical AES key recovery with minimal measurements, exposing vulnerabilities in trusted execution environments.
Contribution
Introduces CacheZoom, a novel cache attack that significantly improves resolution and efficiency, successfully extracting AES keys from SGX enclaves with fewer measurements than prior methods.
Findings
Successfully recovers AES keys with as few as ten measurements.
Demonstrates that SGX does not prevent high-resolution cache side-channel attacks.
Shows practical vulnerabilities in trusted execution environments.
Abstract
In modern computing environments, hardware resources are commonly shared, and parallel computation is widely used. Parallel tasks can cause privacy and security problems if proper isolation is not enforced. Intel proposed SGX to create a trusted execution environment within the processor. SGX relies on the hardware, and claims runtime protection even if the OS and other software components are malicious. However, SGX disregards side-channel attacks. We introduce a powerful cache side-channel attack that provides system adversaries a high resolution channel. Our attack tool named CacheZoom is able to virtually track all memory accesses of SGX enclaves with high spatial and temporal precision. As proof of concept, we demonstrate AES key recovery attacks on commonly used implementations including those that were believed to be resistant in previous scenarios. Our results show that SGX…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSecurity and Verification in Computing · Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security · Cryptographic Implementations and Security
