Simultaneous Multithreading :: Threads Caches Hyper Threading Essays

Simultaneous Multithreading Simultaneous multithreading  ¡Ã‚ ª put simply, the shar-ing of the execution resources of a superscalar processor betweenmultiple execution threads  ¡Ã‚ ª has recently become widespread viaits introduction (under the name  ¡Ã‚ °Hyper-Threading ¡Ã‚ ±) into IntelPentium 4 processors. In this implementation, for reasons of ef-ficiency and economy of processor area, the sharing of processorresources between threads extends beyond the execution units; ofparticular concern is that the threads share access to the memorycaches.We demonstrate that this shared access to memory caches pro-vides not only an easily used high bandwidth covert channel be-tween threads, but also permits a malicious thread (operating, intheory, with limited privileges) to monitor the execution of anotherthread, allowing in many cases for theft of cryptographic keys.Finally, we provide some suggestions to processor designers, op-erating system vendors, and the authors of cryptographic software,of how this atta ck could be mitigated or eliminated entirely.1. IntroductionAs integrated circuit fabrication technologies have improved, provid-ing not only faster transistors but smaller transistors, processor design-ers have been met with two critical challenges. First, memory latencieshave increased dramatically in relative terms; and second, while it iseasy to spend extra transistors on building additional execution units,many programs have fairly limited instruction-level parallelism, whichlimits the extent to which additional execution resources can be uti-lized. Caches provide a partial solution to the first problem, whileout-of-order execution provides a partial solution to the second.In 1995, simultaneous multithreading was revived1in order to com-bat these two difficulties [12]. Where out-of-order execution allowsinstructions to be reordered (subject to maintaining architectural se-mantics) within a narrow window of perhaps a hundred instructions,Key words and phrases. Side channels, sim ultaneous multithreading, caching.1Simultaneous multithreading had existed since at least 1974 in theory [10], evenif it had not yet been shown to be practically feasible. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 2 simultaneous multithreading allows instructions to be reordered acrossthreads; that is, rather than having the operating system perform con-text switches between two threads, it can schedule both threads simul-taneously on the same processor, and instructions will be interleaved,dramatically increasing the utilization of existing execution resources.On the 2.8 GHz Intel Pentium 4 with Hyper-Threading processor,with which the remainder of this paper is concerned2, the two threadsbeing executed on each processor share more than merely the execu-tion units; of particular concern to us, they share access to the memorycaches [8]. Caches have already been demonstrated to be cryptograph-ically dangerous: Many implementations of AES [9] are subject to tim-ing attacks arising from the non-constancy of S-box lookup timings [1].