Security Experts:

Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Audits

New Side-Channel Attack Targets OS Page Cache

A team of researchers, including experts involved in the discovery of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, have disclosed a new type of side-channel attack that targets the operating system page cache.

A team of researchers, including experts involved in the discovery of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, have disclosed a new type of side-channel attack that targets the operating system page cache.

Unlike Meltdown, Spectre and other side-channel attack methods disclosed in the past year – these were possible due to design flaws in microprocessors – page cache attacks are hardware agnostic and they have been demonstrated to work against both Windows and Linux systems.

Page caches are software caches containing all the memory pages associated with files and applications. Page caches give the operating system quicker access to data and reduce the number of disk reads, thus improving performance.

A group of researchers from the Graz University of Technology, Boston University, NetApp, CrowdStrike and Intel have shown how these page caches can be abused for both local and remote attacks.

They demonstrated that an unprivileged piece of malware running on the targeted system can leverage the page cache for various types of activities. Attackers can create a high-speed covert channel that bypasses a sandbox, they can place phishing windows on top of a legitimate application, they can log keystrokes, and reconstruct temporary passwords generated by frameworks that use the current UNIX timestamp for pseudo-random number generation.

Remote page cache attacks are also possible, but they are not hardware agnostic. The remote version of the attack can be used to create a covert channel for exfiltrating information over the network from a protected system using innocuous server request.

While attacks have been successfully conducted by the researchers against both Windows and Linux systems, they pointed out that the method is much more efficient on Windows than it is on Linux.

Michael Schwarz, one of the researchers representing the Graz University of Technology, told SecurityWeek that they have not tested the attack against Apple’s macOS operating system.

The researchers noted that the impact of page cache attacks is not as big as in the case of Meltdown and Spectre. However, they have reported their findings to Microsoft and Linux developers, and they are already said to be working on mitigations. In their paper on page cache attacks, the experts have proposed a series of countermeasures that operating system vendors can implement to mitigate these types of attacks.

New side-channel attack targets operating system page cache

Related: Researchers Disclose 7 New Meltdown, Spectre Attacks

Related: Tech Firms Coordinate Disclosure of New Meltdown, Spectre Flaws

Related: Remote Spectre Attack Allows Data Theft Over Network

Written By

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.

Click to comment

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Join this webinar to learn best practices that organizations can use to improve both their resilience to new threats and their response times to incidents.

Register

Join this live webinar as we explore the potential security threats that can arise when third parties are granted access to a sensitive data or systems.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Application Security

Cycode, a startup that provides solutions for protecting software source code, emerged from stealth mode on Tuesday with $4.6 million in seed funding.

Management & Strategy

SecurityWeek examines how a layoff-induced influx of experienced professionals into the job seeker market is affecting or might affect, the skills gap and recruitment...

Vulnerabilities

Less than a week after announcing that it would suspended service indefinitely due to a conflict with an (at the time) unnamed security researcher...

Risk Management

The supply chain threat is directly linked to attack surface management, but the supply chain must be known and understood before it can be...

Vulnerabilities

Apple has released updates for macOS, iOS and Safari and they all include a WebKit patch for a zero-day vulnerability tracked as CVE-2023-23529.

Application Security

Drupal released updates that resolve four vulnerabilities in Drupal core and three plugins.

Cloud Security

VMware vRealize Log Insight vulnerability allows an unauthenticated attacker to take full control of a target system.

Funding/M&A

Twenty-one cybersecurity-related M&A deals were announced in December 2022.