HyperDegrade: From GHz to MHz Effective CPU Frequencies

Abstract: Performance degradation techniques are an important complement to side-channel attacks. In this work, we propose HyperDegrade -- a combination of previous approaches and the use of simultaneous multithreading (SMT) architectures. In addition to the new technique, we investigate the root causes of performance degradation using cache eviction, discovering a previously unknown slowdown origin. The slowdown produced is significantly higher than previous approaches, which translates into an increased time granularity for Flush+Reload attacks. We evaluate HyperDegrade on different Intel microarchitectures, yielding significant slowdowns that achieve, in select microbenchmark cases, three orders of magnitude improvement over state-of-the-art. To evaluate the efficacy of performance degradation in side-channel amplification, we propose and evaluate leakage assessment metrics. The results evidence that HyperDegrade increases time granularity without a meaningful impact on trace quality. Additionally, we designed a fair experiment that compares three performance degradation strategies when coupled with Flush+Reload from an attacker perspective. We developed an attack on an unexploited vulnerability in OpenSSL in which HyperDegrade excels -- reducing by three times the number of required Flush+Reload traces to succeed. Regarding cryptography contributions, we revisit the recently proposed Raccoon attack on TLS-DH key exchanges, demonstrating its application to other protocols. Using HyperDegrade, we developed an end-to-end attack that shows how a Raccoon-like attack can succeed with real data, filling a missing gap from previous research.