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Rapid Prototyping for Microarchitectural Attacks

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<img src="doc/rapid-prototyping.png" alt="rapid prototyping process" align="center" />

This repository provides two open-source frameworks for microarchitectural attack development, libtea and SCFirefox. libtea provides a C header and kernel driver (compatible with Linux, Windows, and jailbroken Android) for cross-platform attack development in native code, while SCFirefox provides access to the functionality of libtea in a modified Firefox browser (or in the Spidermonkey JS Shell).

The frameworks support rapid prototyping of microarchitectural attacks. Hypotheses can be easily prototyped and tested in native code using libtea. This native code prototype can quickly be ported to the browser using SCFirefox. From here, an attack for unmodified browsers in vanilla JavaScript/WASM can be iteratively constructed by replacing each SCFirefox call individually, experimenting in libtea as needed to determine alternatives for code sequences that have no equivalent. Constructing a browser attack iteratively - rather than beginning in an unmodified browser and trying to build everything at once - provides a much greater degree of control, which speeds up attack development and simplifies debugging. We provide a case study of this process in our paper. Full API documentation and installation instructions for both frameworks are available in their separate READMEs.

These frameworks were developed at the IAIK (Graz University of Technology) and at Dynatrace Research as part of a research project into the microarchitectural attack development process, "Rapid Prototyping for Microarchitectural Attacks", which was presented at USENIX Security 2022. They build on prior work by researchers at the IAIK and the open-source projects PTEditor and SGX-Step.

@inproceedings {easdon2022rapid,
title = {{Rapid Prototyping for Microarchitectural Attacks}},
author = {Catherine Easdon and Michael Schwarz and Martin Schwarzl and Daniel Gruss},
booktitle = {{31st USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 22)}},
year = {2022},
publisher = {{USENIX Association}}
}

This repository includes two appendices for the paper: the extended bibliography for the literature review, and the user study and interview questions.

Contributing

Contributions are very welcome - if you would like to contribute, please feel free to open a PR or open an issue for discussion. In particular, we'd appreciate help with the following:

License

Both frameworks are licensed under GPLv3. Please feel free to use them and adapt them to suit your needs. Feedback and success stories are much appreciated - if the frameworks are useful for your research project, do let us know and we'll share your project here.