Leaking Information Through Cache LRU States

Abstract

The Least-Recently Used cache replacement policy and its variants are widely deployed in modern processors. This paper shows for the first time in detail that the LRU states of caches can be used to leak information: any access to a cache by a sender will modify the LRU state, and the receiver is able to observe this through a timing measurement. This paper presents LRU timing-based channels both when the sender and the receiver have shared memory, e.g., shared library data pages, and when they are separate processes without shared memory. In addition, the new LRU timing-based channels are demonstrated on both Intel and AMD processors in scenarios where the sender and the receiver are sharing the cache in both hyper-threaded setting and time-sliced setting. The transmission rate of the LRU channels can be up to 600Kbps per cache set in the hyper-threaded setting. Different from the majority of existing cache channels which require the sender to trigger cache misses, the new LRU channels work with the sender only having cache hits, making the channel faster and more stealthy. This paper also demonstrates that the new LRU channels can be used in transient execution attacks, e.g., Spectre. Further, this paper shows that the LRU channels pose threats to existing secure cache designs, and this work demonstrates the LRU channels affect the secure PL cache. The paper finishes by discussing and evaluating possible defenses.