Artifacts for A Security RISC

This repository contains the artifacts for the IEEE S&P 2023 paper "A Security RISC: Microarchitectural Attacks on Hardware RISC-V CPUs". You can find the paper on the CISPA website.

Supported Processors and Distributions

Currently, the experiments are tested on both the Alwinner C906, C910 and SiFive U74 processors. Processor specifications from our paper, C910 processor was added afterwards:

Processor	Manufacturer	Distro	Kernel
C906	Allwinner	Debian 12	5.14.0-rc4-nezha (Nezha), 5.4.61 (Lichee RV)
C910	Allwinner	Ubuntu 23.04	5.10.113-g52fbe8443ea1-dirty
U74	SiFive	Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS	5.17.5-visionfive

Utils

We provide a rlibsc.h header file that bundles a few useful instructions for all experiments. To use the header, simply add #include "rlibsc.h" to your code, after copying the header to your path.

Materials

Each subfolder contains a README on how to run the specific experiment. We provide source code for the following experiments:

Additional Materials

• spectre: Spectre exploit on the C910 processor

Case Studies

• access-retired: Discovers hidden files on a system by monitoring the ammount of retired instructions. This code is used during the Dropbox case study.
• zigzagger: Code for the zigzagger case study showing that it is possible to distinguish the branch direction of zigzagger protected code via the count of retired instructions.
• aes_example: Contains the code for all AES T-Table attacks performed.
• interrupt-timing, timer-drift: Shows that it is possible to monitor network interrupts via timing. Also shows that a more precise result is possible using CycleDrift.
• page-walk: Shows timing (and on the U74 instruction differences) that allow to distinguish the length of the page-table walk.
• mbedtls-key-leak: Contains the code for the Flush+Fault exploit on MbedTLS.

Histogram Code

• evict_reload_histrogram: Generates a histrogram for an Evict+Reload covert channel
• fence_flush_histogram: Generates a histrogram for an Flush+Reload attack on the I-Cache using the fence.i instruction.
• fgprime_probe_histrogram: Optimized Prime+Probe for the C906 making use of the FIFO relacement strategy to achive highter transfer rates.
• iflush_reload_histogram: Generates a Flush+Reload histogram using the icache.iva instruction on the C906 and C910.
• flush_reload_histogram: Generates a Flush+Reload histogram using the dcache.iva instruction on the C906 and C910.
• flush_flush_histogram: Generates a Flush+Flush histogram using the dcache.iva instruction on the C906 and C910.
• prime_probe_histogram: Histrogram for a Prime+Probe attack.
• tlb_evict_histogram: Code to genereate a histogram showing that it is possible to evict TLB entries.
• spectre-v1: Histogram that shows that code is spculatively fetched, enabling our Cache+Time attack.

Benchmarks

• timer-evaluation: Benchmark for the precision and increment behavior of the timers present on the tested processors.
• instr-cycles: Shows the timing of most base set instructions

Misc

• square-multiply: Padded square and multiply implementation that is still vulnerable to an attacker that can see the number of retired instructions.
• m-mode-instr-count: Shows that the rdinstret instruction leaks the number of exeuted instructions in M-mode.
• flush-fault: PoC implementations for both variants of Fault+Fault.

Citing Paper and Artifcats

If you use our results in your research, please cite our paper as:

@inproceedings{Gerlach2023SecurityRISC,
 author = {Gerlach, Lukas and Weber, Daniel and Zhang, Ruiyi and Schwarz, Michael},
 booktitle = {S\&P},
 title = {{A Security RISC: Microarchitectural Attacks on Hardware RISC-V CPUs}},
 year = {2023}
}

And our artifacts as:

@misc{Gerlach2023SecurityRISCartifacts,
 author = {Gerlach, Lukas and Weber, Daniel and Zhang, Ruiyi and Schwarz, Michael},
 url = {https://github.com/cispa/Security-RISC}
 title = {{A Security RISC: Microarchitectural Attacks on Hardware RISC-V CPUs Artifact Repository}},
 year = {2023}
}