Enhanced Flush+Reload Attack on AES

Abstract

In cloud computing, multiple users can share the same physical machine that can potentially leak secret information, in particular when the memory de-duplication is enabled. Flush+Reload attack is a cache-based attack that makes use of resource sharing. T-table implementation of AES is commonly used in the crypto libraries like OpenSSL. Several Flush+Reload attacks on T-table implementation of AES have been proposed in the literature which requires a notable number of encryptions. In this paper, we present a technique to enhance the Flush+Reload attack on AES in the ciphertext-only scenario by significantly reducing the number of needed encryptions in both native and cross-VM setups. In this paper, we focus on finding the wrong key candidates and keep the right key by considering only the cache miss event. Our attack is faster than previous Flush+Reload attacks. In particular, our method can speed-up the Flush+Reload attack in cross-VM environment significantly. To verify the theoretical model, we implemented the proposed attack.