Cache-related Hardware Capabilities and Their Impact on Information Security

Abstract

Caching is an important technique to speed-up execution, and its implementation and use cases vary. When applied specifically to the memory hierarchy, caching is used to speed up memory accesses and memory translations. Different cache implementations are considered microarchitectural secrets and oftentimes change between generations. The integration of caches in hardware greatly influences security policy enforcement in the platform since caches maintain copies of code and data and their security properties. Examples of attacks due to the existence of caches are side-channels against cryptographic software, recent speculative execution abuses to leak secret data, and usages of cache-based manipulations (e.g., forcing cache splits/incoherence) to hide from security software detection. This survey examines the security issues due to different cache usages in a microarchitecture. The survey also explains the most complicated caching features and their impact on the security of the platform in different scenarios.