Page Cache Attacks
Daniel Gruss, Erik Kraft, Trishita Tiwari, Michael Schwarz, Ari, Trachtenberg, Jason Hennessey, Alex Ionescu, Anders Fogh

TL;DR
This paper introduces a novel hardware-agnostic side-channel attack on the operating system page cache, enabling unprivileged monitoring of other processes' memory accesses across cores and CPUs, with practical implications for security.
Contribution
It presents a new page cache side-channel attack that works across cores and CPUs, demonstrating various local and remote exploits, and discusses mitigations adopted by OS vendors.
Findings
Achieves 4KB spatial resolution and microsecond temporal resolution in monitoring
Demonstrates sandbox bypass and password recovery attacks
Develops a remote covert channel exploiting the page cache side-channel
Abstract
We present a new hardware-agnostic side-channel attack that targets one of the most fundamental software caches in modern computer systems: the operating system page cache. The page cache is a pure software cache that contains all disk-backed pages, including program binaries, shared libraries, and other files, and our attacks thus work across cores and CPUs. Our side-channel permits unprivileged monitoring of some memory accesses of other processes, with a spatial resolution of 4KB and a temporal resolution of 2 microseconds on Linux (restricted to 6.7 measurements per second) and 466 nanoseconds on Windows (restricted to 223 measurements per second); this is roughly the same order of magnitude as the current state-of-the-art cache attacks. We systematically analyze our side channel by demonstrating different local attacks, including a sandbox bypassing high-speed covert channel, timed…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSecurity and Verification in Computing · Advanced Malware Detection Techniques · Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
