SSBench: Automated Characterization of Memory Dependence Predictors on Modern CPUs

Memory Dependence Predictors (MDPs) improve the performance of modern CPUs by exposing additional parallelism through predicting data dependence between store and load instructions. Since the 1990s, various MDP designs have been proposed across architectures. Recent studies reveal that MDPs are widely deployed on modern CPUs and can be exploited as side channels to leak data. However, because MDP designs are undocumented, characterizing an MDP design still requires complicated manual analysis.

This paper presents SSBench, the first framework to automate the study of MDPs for security on modern CPUs. We first propose a novel workflow-based MDP taxonomy to classify current MDP designs into six categories, and exploit MDP timing side channels for automated MDP identification. We then propose the counter-based model solver for state machine analysis, and the store-load bounce method for organization analysis. Based on these techniques, we deploy SSBench, which performs cross-platform automated identification and characterization of MDPs on more than 30 CPUs from Intel, AMD, Arm, Apple and RISC-V, and uncovers 14 distinct MDP configurations. Based on SSBench’s findings, we propose three novel MDP side-channel attacks. First, on Intel CPUs, we build an MDP-based Weird Machine that achieves up to a 100× performance improvement over state-of-the-art implementations. Second, on AMD CPUs, we develop a byte-level control-flow attack that breaks the inverse modular function used in RSA key generation in the latest version of WolfSSL. Third, we build the first cache/TLB-free covert channel on Apple CPUs, achieving better performance and stealthiness than the state-of-the-art cache and TLB covert channels.

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