The ISC International Journal of Information Security

Abstract In cloud computing, multiple users can share the same physical machine that can potentially leak secret information, in particular when the memory de-duplication is enabled. Flush+Reload attack is a cache-based attack that makes use of resource sharing. T-table implementation of AES is commonly used in the crypto libraries like OpenSSL.
Several Flush+Reload attacks on T-table implementation of AES have been proposed in the literature which requires a notable number of encryptions. In this paper, we present a technique to enhance the Flush+Reload attack on AES in the ciphertext-only scenario by significantly reducing the number of needed encryptions in both native and cross-VM setups. In this paper, we focus on finding the wrong key candidates and keep the right key by considering only the cache miss event. Our attack is faster than previous Flush+Reload attacks. In particular, our method can speed-up the Flush+Reload attack in cross-VM environment significantly. To verify the theoretical model, we implemented the proposed attack.