Reproduce “Revisiting Main Memory-Based Covert and Side Channel Attacks in the Context of Processing-in-Memory” on OpenResearch

About this paper

F. Nisa Bostanci, Konstantinos Kanellopoulos, Ataberk Olgun, A. Giray Yaglikci, Ismail Emir Yuksel, Nika Mansouri Ghiasi, Zulal Bingol, Mohammad Sadrosadati and 1 more

Researchers from ETH Zürich developed IMPACT, a suite of high-throughput timing attacks that exploit DRAM row buffer dynamics in Processing-in-Memory (PiM) architectures. These attacks leverage PiM's direct memory access to achieve covert communication and side-channel leakage up to 6.5 times faster than previous methods, while demonstrating the limitations of current defense strategies.

Key insights

• Processing-in-Memory architectures, by design, offer fast, direct memory access and parallelism, inadvertently creating high-throughput avenues for timing attacks.
• The DRAM row buffer timing channel becomes highly exploitable in PiM systems as it bypasses traditional cache hierarchies that previously masked such fine-grained timing differences.
• Current defense strategies against memory-based timing attacks are either ineffective or introduce significant performance overheads when applied to PiM environments.

Summary by alphaXiv.