Fish and Chips: On the Root Causes of Co-Located Website-Fingerprinting Attacks

Summary

Researchers developed a framework to identify and measure which leakage sources drive microarchitectural website-fingerprinting attacks, which use timing information to reveal a victim's browsing from a co-resident attacker. Testing three published attacks, they identified four leakage classes: core contention, interrupts, frequency scaling, and cache eviction. They showed that controlling these sources can completely mitigate leakage, and that each source alone still leaks enough for fingerprinting. Correlation analysis between source events and measured timing quantified each source's relative contribution.