Slice+Slice Baby: Generating Last-Level Cache Eviction Sets in the Blink of an Eye

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Morgan, Bradley, Horowitz, Gal, O'Connell, Sioli, van Schaik, Stephan, Chuengsatiansup, Chitchanok, Genkin, Daniel, Maennel, Olaf, Montague, Paul, Ronen, Eyal, Yarom, Yuval
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Morgan, Bradley
Horowitz, Gal
O'Connell, Sioli
van Schaik, Stephan
Chuengsatiansup, Chitchanok
Genkin, Daniel
Maennel, Olaf
Montague, Paul
Ronen, Eyal
Yarom, Yuval
author_facet Morgan, Bradley
Horowitz, Gal
O'Connell, Sioli
van Schaik, Stephan
Chuengsatiansup, Chitchanok
Genkin, Daniel
Maennel, Olaf
Montague, Paul
Ronen, Eyal
Yarom, Yuval
contents An essential step for mounting cache attacks is finding eviction sets, collections of memory locations that contend on cache space. On Intel processors, one of the main challenges for identifying contending addresses is the sliced cache design, where the processor hashes the physical address to determine where in the cache a memory location is stored. While past works have demonstrated that the hash function can be reversed, they also showed that it depends on physical address bits that the adversary does not know. In this work, we make three main contributions to the art of finding eviction sets. We first exploit microarchitectural races to compare memory access times and identify the cache slice to which an address maps. We then use the known hash function to both reduce the error rate in our slice identification method and to reduce the work by extrapolating slice mappings to untested memory addresses. Finally, we show how to propagate information on eviction sets across different page offsets for the hitherto unexplored case of non-linear hash functions. Our contributions allow for entire LLC eviction set generation in 0.7 seconds on the Intel i7-9850H and 1.6 seconds on the i9-10900K, both using non-linear functions. This represents a significant improvement compared to state-of-the-art techniques taking 9x and 10x longer, respectively.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_11208
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Slice+Slice Baby: Generating Last-Level Cache Eviction Sets in the Blink of an Eye
Morgan, Bradley
Horowitz, Gal
O'Connell, Sioli
van Schaik, Stephan
Chuengsatiansup, Chitchanok
Genkin, Daniel
Maennel, Olaf
Montague, Paul
Ronen, Eyal
Yarom, Yuval
Cryptography and Security
An essential step for mounting cache attacks is finding eviction sets, collections of memory locations that contend on cache space. On Intel processors, one of the main challenges for identifying contending addresses is the sliced cache design, where the processor hashes the physical address to determine where in the cache a memory location is stored. While past works have demonstrated that the hash function can be reversed, they also showed that it depends on physical address bits that the adversary does not know. In this work, we make three main contributions to the art of finding eviction sets. We first exploit microarchitectural races to compare memory access times and identify the cache slice to which an address maps. We then use the known hash function to both reduce the error rate in our slice identification method and to reduce the work by extrapolating slice mappings to untested memory addresses. Finally, we show how to propagate information on eviction sets across different page offsets for the hitherto unexplored case of non-linear hash functions. Our contributions allow for entire LLC eviction set generation in 0.7 seconds on the Intel i7-9850H and 1.6 seconds on the i9-10900K, both using non-linear functions. This represents a significant improvement compared to state-of-the-art techniques taking 9x and 10x longer, respectively.
title Slice+Slice Baby: Generating Last-Level Cache Eviction Sets in the Blink of an Eye
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.11208