Memory-Aware Denial-of-Service Attacks on Shared Cache in Multicore Real-Time Systems
This addresses security vulnerabilities in embedded multicore systems, potentially impacting real-time performance, but it is incremental as it builds on existing cache attack methods.
The paper tackles the problem of denial-of-service attacks on shared cache in multicore real-time systems by introducing new attacks that exploit memory address mapping and HugePage support, achieving up to 111X increases in worst-case execution time on tested platforms.
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.