Microarchitectural Side-Channel Attacks and Their Impact on Cryptographic Implementations

In the rapidly evolving field of cybersecurity, the robustness of cryptographic implementations against side-channel attacks represents a critical challenge. This talk delves into the research on microarchitectural side-channels, presenting sophisticated attacks that underscore the vulnerability of cryptographic protocols to such threats. First, I will present attacks against WPA3, leaking enough information on the Wi-Fi password to recover it. In particular, one of the attacks exploits a previously undocumented prefetcher behavior, which highlights the complex interplay between hardware design and software security. Next, I explain how we ported a well-known CPU side-channel attack to GPUs, demonstrating the feasibility of executing the Prime+Probe technique via a web browser. This attack enables us to implement a keylogger, an AES key recovery attack and a native-to-browser covert channel, entirely from JavaScript, in a drive-by manner.