A Novel Side-channel Attack That Utilizes Memory Re-orderings (U. of Washington, Duke, UCSC et al.)

Researchers from the University of Washington, Duke University, UC Santa Cruz, Raytheon, and Microsoft Research have published a technical paper titled "Memory DisOrder: Memory Re-orderings as a Timerless Side-channel." The paper introduces a novel side-channel attack that leverages memory re-orderings to infer activity on other processes. Through a fuzzing campaign, the researchers found that mainstream processors like X86, Arm, and Apple CPUs, as well as NVIDIA, AMD, and Apple GPUs, are susceptible to cross-process signals. The vulnerability can be exploited to implement classic attacks, such as a covert channel and application fingerprinting, with significant accuracy. The study highlights the potential for a covert channel to achieve high data rates on X86 CPUs by exploiting low-level system details.