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arXiv · 2005.13853

Flushgeist: Cache Leaks from Beyond the Flush

Pepe Vila·Andreas Abel·Marco Guarnieri·Boris Köpf·Jan Reineke
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Abstract

Flushing the cache, using instructions like clflush and wbinvd, is commonly proposed as a countermeasure against access-based cache attacks. In this report, we show that several Intel caches, specifically the L1 caches in some pre-Skylake processors and the L2 caches in some post-Broadwell processors, leak information even after being flushed through clflush and wbinvd instructions. That is, security-critical assumptions about the behavior of clflush and wbinvd instructions are incorrect, and countermeasures that rely on them should be revised.

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Pepe Vila, Andreas Abel, Marco Guarnieri, Boris Köpf, Jan Reineke. 2020-05-28. Flushgeist: Cache Leaks from Beyond the Flush. https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.13853

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