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Cache Attacks Enable Bulk Key Recovery on the Cloud

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Re: Cache Attacks Enable Bulk Key Recovery on the Cloud

#6
post #3

Can't this be prevented by pinning each VM to different cores?

> The shared Last Level Cache (LLC) now enables true cross-core attacks [44, 8, 29] where the attacker and the victim share the CPU, but not necessarily the CPU core. Most recent LLC Prime and Probe attacks no longer rely on de-duplication [14, 25] or core sharing, making them more widely applicable.

Re: Cache Attacks Enable Bulk Key Recovery on the Cloud

#7
post #2

https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/ayXVWrFpQus As +Andreas Schou said in his share, "Okay. That's it. I give up. Security is impossible."

To clarify, your link talks about a different, unrelated attack, right?

Sorry I was trying to give attribution to the quote. The quote comes from the linked page.

Re: Cache Attacks Enable Bulk Key Recovery on the Cloud

#8
It's very hard with posts like this to understand the true reach of the problem: is this like having ssh with "password" as the password or is it something much less dangeroues. Is this something that could be exploited without Amazon team messing with the hypervisor providing your VM or something a third party can exploit? If this is a problem with Amazon then I think it's not a real problem for many people: it's inevitable to have a trust contract with them, it's pretty much essential to the notion of the cloud. They could be effectively violating their physical security rules for employees and installing modified code on the hypervisor but they still give us hints and certifications as to why that's not the reason and we need to choose to pick that or not. I just wanted to ask because I'm not an expert on this at all and I always find myself asking, how bad is this indeed and under what assumptions is it a security problem? Any hints to understand this are much appreciated! :)

Re: Cache Attacks Enable Bulk Key Recovery on the Cloud

#9

It's very hard with posts like this to understand the true reach of the problem: is this like having ssh with "password" as the password or is it something much less dangeroues. Is this something that could be exploited without Amazon team messing with the hypervisor providing your VM or something a third party can exploit? If this is a problem with Amazon then I think it's not a real problem for many people: it's in…

The abstract answers this: any other tenants (aka third party) running on the same physical machine as your VM can steal the 2048-bit RSA keys stored in your VM. Not specific to Amazon, works with any cloud provider, there was a paper a number of years ago about this.

Re: Cache Attacks Enable Bulk Key Recovery on the Cloud

#10
Wired keyboard can be read from meters away[1], your memory is transparent on shared hosting apparently, lots of installed software had multiple vulnerabilities a year... and yet we are not all compromised already.

Somehow I wonder about that. Spear phishing is very effective and the software itself isn't exactly perfect either. Either very few people are even trying, or something does not add up.

[1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/sec09/tech/full_papers/... "We implemented these side-channel attacks and our best practical attack fully recovered 95% of the keystrokes of a PS/2 keyboard at a distance up to 20 meters, even through walls. We tested 12 different keyboard models bought between 2001 and 2008 (PS/2, USB, wireless and laptop)."

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