The Mirage of Breaking MIRAGE: Analyzing the Modeling Pitfalls in Emerging "Attacks" on MIRAGE

Gururaj Saileshwar, Moinuddin K. Qureshi

Abstract: This letter studies common modeling pitfalls in security analyses of hardware defenses to highlight the importance of accurate reproduction of defenses. We provide a case study of MIRAGE (Saileshwar and Qureshi 2021), a defense against cache side channel attacks, and analyze its incorrect modeling in a recent work (Chakraborty et al., 2023) that claimed to break its security. We highlight several modeling pitfalls that can invalidate the security properties of any defense including a) incomplete modeling of components critical for security, b) usage of random number generators that are insufficiently random, and c) initialization of system to improbable states, leading to an incorrect conclusion of a vulnerability, and show how these modeling bugs incorrectly cause set conflicts to be observed in a recent work’s (Chakraborty et al., 2023) model of MIRAGE. We also provide an implementation addressing these bugs that does not incur set-conflicts, highlighting that MIRAGE is still unbroken.