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Michael Schwarz

Publications and source records attributed to Michael Schwarz.

49 records · Page 3Linked to original sources
arXiv2018

NetSpectre: Read Arbitrary Memory over Network

In this paper, we present NetSpectre, a generic remote Spectre variant 1 attack. For this purpose, we demonstrate the first access-driven remote Evict+Reload cache attack over network, leaking 15 bits per hour. Beyond retrofitting existing attacks to a network scenario, we also demonstrate the first Spectre attack which does not use a cache covert channel. Instead, we present a novel high-performance AVX-based covert channel that we use in our cache-free Spectre attack. We show that in particular remote Spectre attacks perform significantly better with the AVX-based covert channel, leaking 60 bits per hour from the target system. We verified that our NetSpectre attacks work in local-area networks as well as between virtual machines in the Google cloud. NetSpectre marks a paradigm shift from local attacks, to remote attacks, exposing a much wider range and larger number of devices to Spectre attacks. Spectre attacks now must also be considered on devices which do not run any potentially attacker-controlled code at all. We show that especially in this remote scenario, attacks based on weaker gadgets which do not leak actual data, are still very powerful to break address-space layout randomization remotely. Several of the Spectre gadgets we discuss are more versatile than anticipated. In particular, value-thresholding is a technique we devise, which leaks a secret value without the typical bit selection mechanisms. We outline challenges for future research on Spectre attacks and Spectre mitigations.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2018

Nethammer: Inducing Rowhammer Faults through Network Requests

A fundamental assumption in software security is that memory contents do not change unless there is a legitimate deliberate modification. Classical fault attacks show that this assumption does not hold if the attacker has physical access. Rowhammer attacks showed that local code execution is already sufficient to break this assumption. Rowhammer exploits parasitic effects in DRAM to modify the content of a memory cell without accessing it. Instead, other memory locations are accessed at a high frequency. All Rowhammer attacks so far were local attacks, running either in a scripted language or native code. In this paper, we present Nethammer. Nethammer is the first truly remote Rowhammer attack, without a single attacker-controlled line of code on the targeted system. Systems that use uncached memory or flush instructions while handling network requests, e.g., for interaction with the network device, can be attacked using Nethammer. Other systems can still be attacked if they are protected with quality-of-service techniques like Intel CAT. We demonstrate that the frequency of the cache misses is in all three cases high enough to induce bit flips. We evaluated different bit flip scenarios. Depending on the location, the bit flip compromises either the security and integrity of the system and the data of its users, or it can leave persistent damage on the system, i.e., persistent denial of service. We investigated Nethammer on personal computers, servers, and mobile phones. Nethammer is a security landslide, making the formerly local attack a remote attack.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2018

Sobolev-Type Inequalities and Eigenvalue Growth on Graphs with Finite Measure

In this note we study the eigenvalue growth of infinite graphs with discrete spectrum. We assume that the corresponding Dirichlet forms satisfy certain Sobolev-type inequalities and that the total measure is finite. In this sense, the associated operators on these graphs display similarities to elliptic operators on bounded domains in the continuum. Specifically, we prove lower bounds on the eigenvalue growth and show by examples that corresponding upper bounds can not be established.

math.SP↗
arXiv2018

A note on Neumann problems on graphs

We discuss Neumann problems for self-adjoint Laplacians on (possibly infinite) graphs. Under the assumption that the heat semigroup is ultracontractive we discuss the unique solvability for non-empty subgraphs with respect to the vertex boundary and provide analytic and probabilistic representations for Neumann solutions. A second result deals with Neumann problems on canonically compactifiable graphs with respect to the Royden boundary and provides conditions for unique solvability and analytic and probabilistic representations.

math.AP↗
arXiv2018

Another Flip in the Wall of Rowhammer Defenses

The Rowhammer bug allows unauthorized modification of bits in DRAM cells from unprivileged software, enabling powerful privilege-escalation attacks. Sophisticated Rowhammer countermeasures have been presented, aiming at mitigating the Rowhammer bug or its exploitation. However, the state of the art provides insufficient insight on the completeness of these defenses. In this paper, we present novel Rowhammer attack and exploitation primitives, showing that even a combination of all defenses is ineffective. Our new attack technique, one-location hammering, breaks previous assumptions on requirements for triggering the Rowhammer bug, i.e., we do not hammer multiple DRAM rows but only keep one DRAM row constantly open. Our new exploitation technique, opcode flipping, bypasses recent isolation mechanisms by flipping bits in a predictable and targeted way in userspace binaries. We replace conspicuous and memory-exhausting spraying and grooming techniques with a novel reliable technique called memory waylaying. Memory waylaying exploits system-level optimizations and a side channel to coax the operating system into placing target pages at attacker-chosen physical locations. Finally, we abuse Intel SGX to hide the attack entirely from the user and the operating system, making any inspection or detection of the attack infeasible. Our Rowhammer enclave can be used for coordinated denial-of-service attacks in the cloud and for privilege escalation on personal computers. We demonstrate that our attacks evade all previously proposed countermeasures for commodity systems.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2018

Spectre Attacks: Exploiting Speculative Execution

Modern processors use branch prediction and speculative execution to maximize performance. For example, if the destination of a branch depends on a memory value that is in the process of being read, CPUs will try guess the destination and attempt to execute ahead. When the memory value finally arrives, the CPU either discards or commits the speculative computation. Speculative logic is unfaithful in how it executes, can access to the victim's memory and registers, and can perform operations with measurable side effects. Spectre attacks involve inducing a victim to speculatively perform operations that would not occur during correct program execution and which leak the victim's confidential information via a side channel to the adversary. This paper describes practical attacks that combine methodology from side channel attacks, fault attacks, and return-oriented programming that can read arbitrary memory from the victim's process. More broadly, the paper shows that speculative execution implementations violate the security assumptions underpinning numerous software security mechanisms, including operating system process separation, static analysis, containerization, just-in-time (JIT) compilation, and countermeasures to cache timing/side-channel attacks. These attacks represent a serious threat to actual systems, since vulnerable speculative execution capabilities are found in microprocessors from Intel, AMD, and ARM that are used in billions of devices. While makeshift processor-specific countermeasures are possible in some cases, sound solutions will require fixes to processor designs as well as updates to instruction set architectures (ISAs) to give hardware architects and software developers a common understanding as to what computation state CPU implementations are (and are not) permitted to leak.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2018

Meltdown

The security of computer systems fundamentally relies on memory isolation, e.g., kernel address ranges are marked as non-accessible and are protected from user access. In this paper, we present Meltdown. Meltdown exploits side effects of out-of-order execution on modern processors to read arbitrary kernel-memory locations including personal data and passwords. Out-of-order execution is an indispensable performance feature and present in a wide range of modern processors. The attack works on different Intel microarchitectures since at least 2010 and potentially other processors are affected. The root cause of Meltdown is the hardware. The attack is independent of the operating system, and it does not rely on any software vulnerabilities. Meltdown breaks all security assumptions given by address space isolation as well as paravirtualized environments and, thus, every security mechanism building upon this foundation. On affected systems, Meltdown enables an adversary to read memory of other processes or virtual machines in the cloud without any permissions or privileges, affecting millions of customers and virtually every user of a personal computer. We show that the KAISER defense mechanism for KASLR has the important (but inadvertent) side effect of impeding Meltdown. We stress that KAISER must be deployed immediately to prevent large-scale exploitation of this severe information leakage.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2017

Courant's Nodal Domain Theorem for Positivity Preserving Forms

We introduce a notion of nodal domains for positivity preserving forms. This notion generalizes the classical ones for Laplacians on domains and on graphs. We prove the Courant nodal domain theorem in this generalized setting using purely analytical methods.

math.SP↗
arXiv2017

Automated Detection, Exploitation, and Elimination of Double-Fetch Bugs using Modern CPU Features

Double-fetch bugs are a special type of race condition, where an unprivileged execution thread is able to change a memory location between the time-of-check and time-of-use of a privileged execution thread. If an unprivileged attacker changes the value at the right time, the privileged operation becomes inconsistent, leading to a change in control flow, and thus an escalation of privileges for the attacker. More severely, such double-fetch bugs can be introduced by the compiler, entirely invisible on the source-code level. We propose novel techniques to efficiently detect, exploit, and eliminate double-fetch bugs. We demonstrate the first combination of state-of-the-art cache attacks with kernel-fuzzing techniques to allow fully automated identification of double fetches. We demonstrate the first fully automated reliable detection and exploitation of double-fetch bugs, making manual analysis as in previous work superfluous. We show that cache-based triggers outperform state-of-the-art exploitation techniques significantly, leading to an exploitation success rate of up to 97%. Our modified fuzzer automatically detects double fetches and automatically narrows down this candidate set for double-fetch bugs to the exploitable ones. We present the first generic technique based on hardware transactional memory, to eliminate double-fetch bugs in a fully automated and transparent manner. We extend defensive programming techniques by retrofitting arbitrary code with automated double-fetch prevention, both in trusted execution environments as well as in syscalls, with a performance overhead below 1%.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2017

KeyDrown: Eliminating Keystroke Timing Side-Channel Attacks

Besides cryptographic secrets, side-channel attacks also leak sensitive user input. The most accurate attacks exploit cache timings or interrupt information to monitor keystroke timings and subsequently infer typed words and sentences. Previously proposed countermeasures fail to prevent keystroke timing attacks as they do not protect keystroke processing among the entire software stack. We close this gap with KeyDrown, a new defense mechanism against keystroke timing attacks. KeyDrown injects a large number of fake keystrokes in the kernel to prevent interrupt-based attacks and Prime+Probe attacks on the kernel. All keystrokes, including fake keystrokes, are carefully propagated through the shared library in order to hide any cache activity and thus to prevent Flush+Reload attacks. Finally, we provide additional protection against Prime+Probe for password input in user space programs. We show that attackers cannot distinguish fake keystrokes from real keystrokes anymore and we evaluate KeyDrown on a commodity notebook as well as on two Android smartphones. We show that KeyDrown eliminates any advantage an attacker can gain from using interrupt or cache side-channel information.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2016

DRAMA: Exploiting DRAM Addressing for Cross-CPU Attacks

In cloud computing environments, multiple tenants are often co-located on the same multi-processor system. Thus, preventing information leakage between tenants is crucial. While the hypervisor enforces software isolation, shared hardware, such as the CPU cache or memory bus, can leak sensitive information. For security reasons, shared memory between tenants is typically disabled. Furthermore, tenants often do not share a physical CPU. In this setting, cache attacks do not work and only a slow cross-CPU covert channel over the memory bus is known. In contrast, we demonstrate a high-speed covert channel as well as the first side-channel attack working across processors and without any shared memory. To build these attacks, we use the undocumented DRAM address mappings. We present two methods to reverse engineer the mapping of memory addresses to DRAM channels, ranks, and banks. One uses physical probing of the memory bus, the other runs entirely in software and is fully automated. Using this mapping, we introduce DRAMA attacks, a novel class of attacks that exploit the DRAM row buffer that is shared, even in multi-processor systems. Thus, our attacks work in the most restrictive environments. First, we build a covert channel with a capacity of up to 2 Mbps, which is three to four orders of magnitude faster than memory-bus-based channels. Second, we build a side-channel template attack that can automatically locate and monitor memory accesses. Third, we show how using the DRAM mappings improves existing attacks and in particular enables practical Rowhammer attacks on DDR4.

cs.CR↗