{"title":"The Mirage of Breaking MIRAGE: Analyzing the Modeling Pitfalls in Emerging “Attacks” on MIRAGE","authors":"Gururaj Saileshwar;Moinuddin Qureshi","doi":"10.1109/LCA.2023.3297875","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":51248,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Computer Architecture Letters","volume":"22 2","pages":"121-124"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4000,"publicationDate":"2023-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"IEEE Computer Architecture Letters","FirstCategoryId":"94","ListUrlMain":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10190227/","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q4","JCRName":"COMPUTER SCIENCE, HARDWARE & ARCHITECTURE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
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.
期刊介绍:
IEEE Computer Architecture Letters is a rigorously peer-reviewed forum for publishing early, high-impact results in the areas of uni- and multiprocessor computer systems, computer architecture, microarchitecture, workload characterization, performance evaluation and simulation techniques, and power-aware computing. Submissions are welcomed on any topic in computer architecture, especially but not limited to: microprocessor and multiprocessor systems, microarchitecture and ILP processors, workload characterization, performance evaluation and simulation techniques, compiler-hardware and operating system-hardware interactions, interconnect architectures, memory and cache systems, power and thermal issues at the architecture level, I/O architectures and techniques, independent validation of previously published results, analysis of unsuccessful techniques, domain-specific processor architectures (e.g., embedded, graphics, network, etc.), real-time and high-availability architectures, reconfigurable systems.