FlushTime: Towards Mitigating Flush-based Cache Attacks via Collaborating Flush Instructions and Timers on ARMv8-A
Jingquan Ge, Fengwei Zhang · 2023
ARMv8-A processors generally utilize optimization techniques such as multi-layer cache, out-of-order execution and branch prediction to improve performance. These optimization techniques are inevitably threatened by cache-related attacks including Flush+Reload, Flush+Flush, Meltdown, Spectre, and their variants. These attacks can break the isolation boundaries between different processes or even between user and kernel spaces. Researchers proposed many defense schemes to resist these cache-related attacks. However, they either need to modify the hardware architecture, have incomplete coverage, or introduce significant performance overhead.