DramaQueen: Revisiting Side Channels in DRAM

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Presented at Hardwear.io Netherlands 2024 by

Side channels are an old problem on CPU’s. Can we solve them once and for all? We protect our secure code by mapping it in non-cacheable memory; and so by bypassing side channel-sensitive buffers (data and code caches, branch predictor buffers, etc.) on CPU’s, even disabling SMT, making concurrent access to caches pointless, and concurrent access to certain micro-architectural buffers impossible. In this talk we present an exploitable side channel that remains in DRAM when bypassing buffers and caches on the CPU and present realistic key recovery results.