Revisiting Main Memory-Based Covert and Side Channel Attacks in the Context of Processing-in-Memory

TL;DR

This paper introduces IMPACT, a high-throughput main memory-based timing attack exploiting processing-in-memory architectures to establish covert channels and leak private information, surpassing previous methods in speed and efficiency.

Contribution

IMPACT is a novel set of timing attacks that leverages PiM architecture characteristics to enable high-throughput covert and side-channel attacks without cache bypassing.

Findings

Achieves covert channel throughput of 8.2 Mb/s and 14.8 Mb/s.

Outperforms state-of-the-art by 3.6x and 6.5x in covert channel speed.

Successfully leaks private information with low error rate.

Abstract

We introduce IMPACT, a set of high-throughput main memory-based timing attacks that leverage characteristics of processing-in-memory (PiM) architectures to establish covert and side channels. IMPACT enables high-throughput communication and private information leakage by exploiting the shared DRAM row buffer. To achieve high throughput, IMPACT (i) eliminates expensive cache bypassing steps required by processor-centric memory-based timing attacks and (ii) leverages the intrinsic parallelism of PiM operations. We showcase two applications of IMPACT. First, we build two covert channels that leverage different PiM approaches (i.e., processing-near-memory and processing-using-memory) to establish high-throughput covert communication channels. Our covert channels achieve 8.2 Mb/s and 14.8 Mb/s communication throughput, respectively, which is 3.6x and 6.5x higher than the state-of-the-art main memory-based covert channel. Second, we showcase a side-channel attack that leaks private information of concurrently-running victim applications with a low error rate. Our source-code is openly and freely available at https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/IMPACT.