Hacks: iTimed - Cache Attacks on the Apple A10 Fusion SoC

[grarpamp]

https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/464

Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2021/464

iTimed: Cache Attacks on the Apple A10 Fusion SoC

Gregor Haas and Seetal Potluri and Aydin Aysu

Abstract: This paper proposes the first cache timing side-channel
attack on one of Apple’s mobile devices. Utilizing a recent, permanent
exploit named checkm8, we reverse-engineered Apple’s BootROM and
created a powerful toolkit for running arbitrary hardware security
experiments on Apple’s in-house designed ARM systems-on-a-chip (SoC).
Using this toolkit, we then implement an access-driven cache timing
attack (in the style of PRIME+PROBE) as a proof-of-concept
illustrator.

The advanced hardware control enabled by our toolkit allowed us to
reverse-engineer key microarchitectural details of the Apple A10
Fusion’s memory hierarchy. We find that the SoC employs a randomized
cache-line replacement policy as well as a hardware-based L1
prefetcher. We propose statistical innovations which specifically
account for these hardware structures and thus further the
state-of-the-art in cache timing attacks. We find that our
access-driven attack, at best, can reduce the security of OpenSSL
AES-128 by 50 more bits than a straightforward adaptation of
PRIME+PROBE, while requiring only half as many side channel
measurement traces.

Category / Keywords: implementation / SCA, cache attacks, iPhone
Original Publication (in the same form): IEEE HOST
Date: received 9 Apr 2021, last revised 14 Aug 2021
Contact author: ghaas at ncsu edu
Version: 20210814:150739