Hardening the security of modern operating systems against side-channel and rowhammer attacks

Abstract

Advancements in exploitation techniques call for the need of advanced defenses. Modern operating systems have to face new sophisticate attacks that do not rely on any programming mistake, rather they exploit leaking information from computational side effects (side-channel attacks) or hardware glitches (rowhammer attacks). Mitigating these new attacks poses new challanges and involves delicate trade-offs, balancing security on one side and performance, simplicity, and compatibility on the other. In this disseration we explore the attack surface exposed by page fusion, a memory saving optimization in modern operating systems and, after that, a secure page fusion implementation called VUsion is shown. We then propose a complete and compatible software solution to rowhammer attacks called ZebRAM. Lastly, we show OpenCAL, a free and general libray for the implementation of Cellular Automata, that can be used in several security scenarios.