LinuxSecurity.com
Share your story
The central voice for Linux and Open Source security news
Home News Topics Advisories HOWTOs Features Newsletters About Register

Welcome!
Sign up!
EnGarde Community
Login
Polls
What is the most important Linux security technology?
 
Advisories
Community
Linux Events
Linux User Groups
Link to Us
Security Center
Book Reviews
Security Dictionary
Security Tips
SELinux
White Papers
Featured Blogs
All About Linux
DanWalsh LiveJournal
Securitydistro
Latest Newsletters
Linux Security Week: June 29th, 2009
Linux Advisory Watch: June 26th, 2009
Subscribe
LinuxSecurity Newsletters
E-mail:
Choose Lists:
About our Newsletters
RSS Feeds
Get the LinuxSecurity news you want faster with RSS
Powered By

  
On the Power of Simple Branch Prediction Analysis Print E-mail
User Rating:      How can I rate this item?
Source: Cryptology ePrint Archives - Posted by Eric Lubow   
Cryptography Deep CPU pipelines paired with the CPU’s ability to fetch and issue multiple instructions at every machine cycle led to the concept of superscalar processors. Superscalar processors admit a theoretical or best-case performance of less than 1 machine cycle per completed instructions, cf. [She]. However, the inevitably required branch instructions in the underlying machine languages were very soon recognized as one of the most painful performance killers of superscalar processors. Not surprisingly, CPU architects quickly invented the concept of branch predictors in order to circumvent those performance bottlenecks. Thus, it is not surprising that there has been a vibrant and very practical research on more and more sophisticated branch prediction mechanisms, cf. [PH,Sha,She]. Unfortunately, a very recent paper, cf. [ASK], identified branch prediction as a novel and unforeseen side-channel, thus being another new security threat within the computer security field. Let us elaborate a little bit on this connection between side-channel attacks and modern computer-architecture ingredients.

So far, typical targets of side-channel attacks have been mainly Smart Cards, cf. [CNK,Koc]. This is due to the ease of applying such attacks to smart cards. The measurements of sidechannel information on smart cards are almost “noiseless”, which makes such attacks very practical. On the other side, there are many factors that affect such measurements on real commodity computer systems based upon the most successful one, the Intel x86-architecture, cf. [Sha]. These factors create noise, and therefore it is much more difficult to develop and perform successful attacks on such “real” computers within our daily life. Thus, until very recently, the vulnerability of systems even running on servers was not “really” considered to be harmful by such side-channel attacks. This was changed with the work of Brumley and Boneh, cf. [BB], who demonstrated a remote timing attack over a real local network. They simply adapted the attack principle as introduced in [Sch] to show that the RSA implementation of OpenSSL [open] — the most widely used open source crypto library — was not immune to such attacks.

Read this full article at Cryptology ePrint Archives

Write Comment
  • Please keep the topic of messages relevant to the subject of the article.
  • Personal verbal attacks will be deleted.
  • Please don't use comments to plug your web site.. Such material will be removed.
Name:
Title:
Comment:

Code:* Code

Powered by AkoComment!

 
< Prev   Next >
    
Partner:

 

Latest Features
Review: Googling Security: How Much Does Google Know About You
A Secure Nagios Server
Never Installed a Firewall on Ubuntu? Try Firestarter
Review: Hacking Exposed Linux, Third Edition
Security Features of Firefox 3.0
Review: The Book of Wireless
April 2008 Open Source Tool of the Month: sudo
Yesterday's Edition

QuickLinks: Comunity , HOWTOs , Blogs , Features , Book Reviews , Networking ,
  Security Projects ,   Latest News ,  Newsletters ,  SELinux ,  Privacy ,  Home,
 Hardening ,   About Us,   Advertise,   Legal Notice,   RSS,   Guardian Digital
  Home Security Systems, Surveillance Cameras

(c)Copyright 2009 Guardian Digital, Inc. All rights reserved.