@inproceedings{tugraz:tlbsidechannel, title = "When Good Kernel Defenses Go Bad: Reliable and Stable Kernel Exploits via Defense-Amplified TLB Side-Channel Leaks", abstract = "Over the past decade, the Linux kernel has seen a significant number of memory-safety vulnerabilities. However, exploiting these vulnerabilities becomes substantially harder as defenses increase. A fundamental defense of the Linux kernel is the randomization of memory locations for security-critical objects, which greatly limits or prevents exploitation.In this paper, we show that we can exploit side-channel leakage in defenses to leak the locations of security-critical kernel objects. These location disclosure attacks enable successful exploitations on the latest Linux kernel, facilitating reliable and stable system compromise both with re-enabled and new exploit techniques. To identify side-channel leakages of defenses, we systematically analyze 127 defenses. Based on this analysis, we show that enabling any of 3 defenses – enforcing strict memory permissions or virtualizing the kernel heap or kernel stack – allows us to obtain fine-grained TLB contention patterns via an Evict+Reload TLB side-channel attack. We combine these patterns with kernel allocator massaging to present location disclosure attacks, leaking the locations of kernel objects, i.e., heap objects, page tables, and stacks. To demonstrate the practicality of these attacks, we evaluate them on recent Intel CPUs and multiple kernel versions, with a runtime of 0.3 s to 17.8 s and almost no false positives. Since these attacks work due to side-channel leakage in defenses, we argue that the virtual stack defense makes the system less secure.", author = "Lukas Maar and Lukas Giner and Daniel Gruss and Stefan Mangard", year = "2025", month = aug, day = "13", language = "English", series = "Proceedings of the 34rd USENIX Security Symposium", publisher = "USENIX Association", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 34rd USENIX Security Symposium", address = "United States", note = "34th USENIX Security Symposium : USENIX Security 2025, USENIX'25 ; Conference date: 13-08-2025 Through 15-08-2025", url = "https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity25", } @inproceedings{tugraz:prefetch, author = {Gruss, Daniel and Maurice, Clementine and Fogh, Anders and Lipp, Moritz and Mangard, Stefan}, title = {Prefetch Side-Channel Attacks: Bypassing SMAP and Kernel ASLR}, year = {2016}, isbn = {9781450341394}, publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/2976749.2978356}, doi = {10.1145/2976749.2978356}, abstract = {Modern operating systems use hardware support to protect against control-flow hijacking attacks such as code-injection attacks. Typically, write access to executable pages is prevented and kernel mode execution is restricted to kernel code pages only. However, current CPUs provide no protection against code-reuse attacks like ROP. ASLR is used to prevent these attacks by making all addresses unpredictable for an attacker. Hence, the kernel security relies fundamentally on preventing access to address information. We introduce Prefetch Side-Channel Attacks, a new class of generic attacks exploiting major weaknesses in prefetch instructions. This allows unprivileged attackers to obtain address information and thus compromise the entire system by defeating SMAP, SMEP, and kernel ASLR. Prefetch can fetch inaccessible privileged memory into various caches on Intel x86. It also leaks the translation-level for virtual addresses on both Intel x86 and ARMv8-A. We build three attacks exploiting these properties. Our first attack retrieves an exact image of the full paging hierarchy of a process, defeating both user space and kernel space ASLR. Our second attack resolves virtual to physical addresses to bypass SMAP on 64-bit Linux systems, enabling ret2dir attacks. We demonstrate this from unprivileged user programs on Linux and inside Amazon EC2 virtual machines. Finally , we demonstrate how to defeat kernel ASLR on Windows 10, enabling ROP attacks on kernel and driver binary code. We propose a new form of strong kernel isolation to protect commodity systems incuring an overhead of only 0.06-5.09\%.}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security}, pages = {368–379}, numpages = {12}, keywords = {timing attacks, kernel vulnerabilities, ASLR}, location = {Vienna, Austria}, series = {CCS '16}, } @inproceedings{DBLP:conf/sc/AndreadisVMI18, author = {Georgios Andreadis and Laurens Versluis and Fabian Mastenbroek and Alexandru Iosup}, title = {A reference architecture for datacenter scheduling: design, validation, and experiments}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, {SC} 2018, Dallas, TX, USA, November 11-16, 2018}, pages = {37:1--37:15}, publisher = {{IEEE} / {ACM}}, year = {2018}, url = {http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3291706}, timestamp = {Mon, 12 Nov 2018 09:20:44 +0100}, biburl = {https://dblp.org/rec/conf/sc/AndreadisVMI18.bib}, bibsource = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org}, }