Cache Based Side-Channel Attacks

Abstract

In the current era of computation, multiple processor cores are deployed in devices that range from smart-phones, laptops, desktops, servers, and cloud-based systems. Though, innovations in the world of hardware and computer architecture have resulted in faster computation in terms of better performance, a lot of sensitive data that is stored and processed by these devices can get leaked through various hardware components, such as branch predictors, caches, Translation lookaside buffers (TLBs), hardware prefetchers, Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) controllers, and the DRAM. Basically, these hardware components become side-channels and leak information through attacks known as side-channel attacks. A recent and famous attack that was of similar taste was the famous Spectre and Meltdown attacks. This chapter discusses some of the famous side-channel attacks on on-chip SRAM cache memories and off-chip DRAM memory.