On 1/7/19 12:08 PM, Dominique Martinet wrote:

quoted

That's my bigger concern here. In [1] there's described a remote attack
(on webserver) using the page fault timing differences for present/not
present page cache pages. Noisy but works, and I expect locally it to be
much less noisy. Yet the countermeasures section only mentions
restricting mincore() as if it was sufficient (and also how to make
evictions harder, but that's secondary IMHO).

I'd suggest making clock rougher for non-root users but javascript tried
that and it wasn't enough... :)
Honestly won't be of much help there, good luck?

Restricting mincore() is sufficient to fix the hardware-agnostic part.
If the attack is not hardware-agnostic anymore, an attacker could also
just use a hardware cache attack, which has a higher temporal and
spatial resolution, so there's no reason why the attacker would use page
cache attacks instead then.


Cheers,
Daniel