Uncovering Hidden Instructions in Armv8-A Implementations

Abstract

Though system and application level security has received and continue to receive significant attention, interest in hardware security has spiked only in the last few years. The majority of recently disclosed hardware security attacks exploit well known and documented hardware behaviours such as speculation, cache and memory timings, etc. We observe that security exploits in undocumented hardware behaviour can have even more severe consequences as such behaviour is rarely verified and protected against. This paper introduces armshaker, a tool to uncover one such undocumented behaviour in the Armv8 architecture, namely hidden instructions. These are the instructions that are not documented in the ISA reference manual, but still execute successfully. We tested five different Armv8-A hardware platforms from four different vendors, as well as two Armv8-A emulators, and uncovered multiple hidden instructions. An interesting finding is that, though we did not discover any hidden instruction in the hardware itself, bugs in the system software can induce hidden instructions in the system that, from a user’s perspective, are indistinguishable from hidden instructions in hardware. Though armshaker did not find any hidden instruction in the hardware of the tested platforms, their existence cannot be ruled out, given the diversity of available Arm processors. Consequently, we make armshaker publicly available as open-source software to enable users to audit their own systems for hidden instructions.