Unraveling timewarp: what all the fuzz is about?

Abstract

Timing attacks are a threat to networked computing systems especially the emerging cloud computing infrastructures. The precision timestamp counters present in modern microprocessors is a popularly used side channel source for timing information. These counters are able to measure the variability of timings that are caused from microarchitectural effects, like cache access patterns and branch miss predictions, and have been routinely used for demonstrating practical attacks against well known ciphers. Recently, researchers have attempted to inhibit precision timing measurements by fuzzing the timestamp, through a time-warped mechanism. In this paper, we demonstrate that in spite of fuzzing time, timing attack are still possible.