Frequency Throttling Side-Channel Attack
Chen Liu, Abhishek Chakraborty, Nikhil Chawla, Neer Roggel

TL;DR
This paper reveals that dynamic CPU frequency adjustments, used for power management, can leak timing information that enables attackers to recover secret cryptographic keys, compromising system security.
Contribution
It introduces a novel frequency throttling side-channel attack exploiting power management behavior to infer secret data, validated on AES encryption across multiple systems.
Findings
Attack successfully recovers entire AES key bytes
Effective across different systems and threat models
Highlights need for mitigation strategies
Abstract
Modern processors dynamically control their operating frequency to optimize resource utilization, maximize energy savings, and conform to system-defined constraints. If, during the execution of a software workload, the running average of any electrical or thermal parameter exceeds its corresponding predefined threshold value, the power management architecture will reactively adjust CPU frequency to ensure safe operating conditions. In this paper, we demonstrate how such power management-based frequency throttling activity forms a source of timing side-channel information leakage, which can be exploited by an attacker to infer secret data even from a constant-cycle victim workload. The proposed frequency throttling side-channel attack can be launched by both kernel-space and user-space attackers, thus compromising security guarantees provided by isolation boundaries. We validate our…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSecurity and Verification in Computing · Cryptographic Implementations and Security · Advanced Malware Detection Techniques
