New Noise-Resilient Attack On Intel and AMD CPUs Makes Flush-based Attacks Effective

Modern Intel and AMD processors are susceptible to a new form of side-channel attack that makes flush-based cache attacks resilient to system noise, newly published research shared with The Hacker News has revealed.

The findings are from a paper “DABANGG: Time for Fearless Flush based Cache Attacks” published by a pair of researchers, Biswabandan Panda and Anish Saxena, from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur earlier this week.

Dubbed “Dabangg” (meaning fearless), the approach builds upon the Flush+Reload and Flush+Flush attacks, which have been exploited previously by other researchers to leak data from Intel CPUs.

However, the new variant aims to improve the accuracy of these attacks even in a noisy multi-core system. It also works seamlessly against non-Linux Operating Systems, like macOS.

“Like any other cache attacks, flush based cache attacks rely on the calibration of cache latency,” Biswabandan Panda, assistant professor at IIT Kanpur, told The Hacker News. “State-of-the-art cache timing attacks are not effective in the real world as most of them work in a highly controlled environment.”

“With DABANGG, we make a case for cache attacks that can succeed in the…