HITB 2016 Amsterdam: Cache Side Channel Attacks 'very dangerous'
A security researcher has shown how Intel CPU's among others are vulnerable to cache side channel attacks at the the 7th Hack in the Box Amsterdam.
The possibility of cache side channels attacks occurred to Anders Fogh, co-founder/ vice president of engineering, Protect Software GmbH, after one researcher brought up over twitter an oversight in a talk Fogh was about to give at Blackhat. The researcher's addition of side channel attacks, “threw my plans to the wind” said Fogh.
When his Row Hammer mitigation, which was running in the background, triggered, “it detected my cache side channel attack as a row hammer attack.” He spent a year researching side channel attacks, and it was at the 7th HITB that he revealed his work.
Most think of security vulnerabilities as residing within software, but the notable point about the cache side channel attacks is that it exploits a vulnerability in hardware. Fogh said: “Usually we think if the software is written correctly, we think are safe”. This, added Fogh “is not about bug, this is about design decisions that are made when implementing the CPU” but not changed."
