Methods of Extracting Parameters of the Processor Caches

Sihao Shen, Zhenzhen Li, Wei Song

Abstract: As attack scenarios and targets are constantly expanding, cache side-channel attacks have gradually penetrated into various daily applications and brought great security risks. The success of a cache side-channel attack relies heavily on the pre-knowledge of some important parameters of the target cache system. Existing methods for reading cache parameters have their limits. In this paper, a series of tests are proposed to extract cache parameters at runtime, which provides a method for launching existing cache side-channel attacks in some restricted cases and reduces the cost of attacks. They have been used to extract cache parameters on four processors using three different architectures, as well as in a restricted virtual machine environment. The extracted parameters match with the publicly available information, including some parameters unavailable from the CPUID instruction.