Bluethunder: A 2-level Directional Predictor Based Side-Channel Attack against SGX

Huo, Tianlin; Meng, Xiaoni; Wang, Wenhao; Hao, Chunliang; Zhao, Pengshan; Zhai, Jun; Li, Mingshu

doi:10.13154/tches.v2020.i1.321-347

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Usually, the mitigation techniques for attacks in the same category are similar to each other. For instance, Controlled Channel Attacks [9]- [14] and Branch Prediction Attacks [26]- [28] can be mitigated using Compiler/SDK techniques or modifying the Application design.…”

Section: Discussion On the Current Status Of Mitigationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This shows that the branch predictor unit can be vulnerable even in the face of BTB protections. Bluethunder [28] is another branch predictor attack similar to BranchScope. The main difference of Bluethunder to BranchScope is that Bluethunder uses a 2-level directional predictor which is a completely different branch predictor unit.…”

Section: Branch Prediction Attacks [26]-[28]mentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Survey of Published Attacks on Intel SGX

Nilsson,

Bideh,

Brorsson

2020

Preprint

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Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) provides a trusted execution environment (TEE) to run code and operate sensitive data. SGX provides runtime hardware protection where both code and data are protected even if other code components are malicious. However, recently many attacks targeting SGX have been identified and introduced that can thwart the hardware defence provided by SGX. In this paper we present a survey of all attacks specifically targeting Intel SGX that are known to the authors, to date. We categorized the attacks based on their implementation details into 7 different categories. We also look into the available defence mechanisms against identified attacks and categorize the available types of mitigations for each presented attack.

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Section: Discussion On the Current Status Of Mitigationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Branch Prediction Attacks [26]-[28]mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Survey of Published Attacks on Intel SGX

Nilsson,

Bideh,

Brorsson

2020

Preprint

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“…Papers such as [7,11,76] have identified vulnerabilities in the TEE implementation, resulting in memory and CPU register leaks, as well as the creation of fake attestation reports. Side channel attacks allow attackers to extract secrets from the enclave by observing resources such as caches [10,15,20,27,48,64], branch predictions [21,30,37], and memory usage [49]. Tools such as SGX-Step [74] provide attackers with instruction level control and increase the efficiency of side-channel attacks.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

SGXonerate:Finding (and Partially Fixing) Privacy Flaws in TEE-based Smart Contract Platforms Without Breaking the TEE

Jean-Louis,

Li,

et al. 2024

PoPETs

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TEE-based smart contracts are an emerging blockchain architecture, offering fully programmable privacy with better performance than alternatives like secure multiparty computation. They can also support compatibility with existing smart contract languages, such that existing (plaintext) applications can be readily ported, picking up privacy enhancements automatically. While previous analysis of TEE-based smart contracts have focused on failures of TEE itself, we asked whether other aspects might be understudied. We focused on state consistency, a concern area highlighted by Li et al., as well as new concerns including access pattern leakage and software upgrade mechanisms. We carried out a code review of a cohort of four TEE-based smart contract platforms. These include Secret Network, the first to market with in-use applications, as well as Oasis, Phala, and Obscuro, which have at least released public test networks. The first and most broadly applicable result is that access pattern leakage occurs when handling persistent contract storage. On Secret Network, its fine-grained access pattern is catastrophic for the transaction privacy of SNIP-20 tokens. If ERC-20 tokens were naively ported to Oasis they would be similarly vulnerable; the others in the cohort leak coarse-grained information at approximately the page level (4 kilobytes). Improving and characterizing this will require adopting techniques from ORAMs or encrypted databases. Second, the importance of state consistency has been underappreciated, in part because exploiting such vulnerabilities is thought to be impractical. We show they are fully practical by building a proof-of-concept tool that breaks all advertised privacy properties of SNIP-20 tokens, able to query the balance of individual accounts and the token amount of each transfer. We additionally demonstrate MEV attacks against the Sienna Swap application. As a final consequence of lacking state consistency, the developers have inadvertently introduced a decryption backdoor through their software upgrade process. We have helped the Secret developers mitigate this through a coordinated vulnerability disclosure, after which their state consistency should be roughly on par with the rest.

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