Memory-Aware Denial-of-Service Attacks on Shared Cache in Multicore Real-Time Systems

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that memory performance can be exploited to launch user-space cache DoS attacks in multicore real-time systems, significantly increasing worst-case execution times even with cache partitioning.

Contribution

It introduces novel memory-aware cache DoS attacks that leverage address mapping and HugePage support to cause severe WCET impacts from user-space.

Findings

Achieve up to 111X WCET increase on tested platforms

Effective attack implementation from user-space

Attacks work even with cache partitioning

Abstract

In this paper, we identify that memory performance plays a crucial role in the feasibility and effectiveness for performing denial-of-service attacks on shared cache. Based on this insight, we introduce new cache DoS attacks, which can be mounted from the user-space and can cause extreme worst-case execution time (WCET) impacts to cross-core victims -- even if the shared cache is partitioned -- by taking advantage of the platform's memory address mapping information and HugePage support. We deploy these enhanced attacks on two popular embedded out-of-order multicore platforms using both synthetic and real-world benchmarks. The proposed DoS attacks achieve up to 111X WCET increases on the tested platforms.