Can Microkernels Mitigate Microarchitectural Attacks?
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Abstract
Microarchitectural attacks such as Meltdown and Spectre have attracted much attention recently. In this paper we study how effective these attacks are on the Genode microkernel framework using three different kernels, Okl4, Nova, and Linux. We try to answer the question whether the strict process separation provided by Genode combined with security-oriented kernels such as Okl4 and Nova can mitigate microarchitectural attacks. We evaluate the attack effectiveness by measuring the throughput of data transfer that violates the security properties of the system. Our results show that the underlying side-channel attack Flush+Reload used in both Meltdown and Spectre, is effective on all investigated platforms. We were also able to achieve high throughput using the Spectre attack, but we were not able to show any effective Meltdown attack on Okl4 or Nova.
Keywords
Genode Meltdown Spectre Flush+Reload Okl4 NovaReferences
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