Daniel Moghimi
Before joining Google as a Senior Research Scientist, Daniel was a postdoctoral scholar at UCSD. He has a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering and an MSc in Computer Science from WPI. He works on computer and hardware security, spanning various topics such as microarchitectural vulnerabilities, side-channel cryptanalysis, and security architecture. His research has improved the security of superscalar CPUs, memory subsystems, and cryptographic implementations, which billions of users use daily.
Authored Publications
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Hardware-Assisted Fault Isolation: Going Beyond the Limits of Software-Based Sandboxing
Anjo Vahldiek-Oberwagner
Tal Garfinkel
Deian Stefan
Michael LeMay
Evan Johnson
Mohammadkazem Taram
Chris Fallin
Ravi Sahita
Joey Rudek
Shravan Narayan
Dean Tullsen
IEEE Micro (2024)
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Hardware-assisted Fault Isolation (HFI) is a minimal extension to current processors that supports secure, flexible, and efficient in-process isolation. HFI addresses the limitations of software-based isolation (SFI) systems including: runtime overheads, limited scalability, vulnerability to Spectre attacks, and limited compatibility with existing code. HFI can be seamlessly integrated into exisiting SFI systems (e.g. WebAssembly), or directly sandbox unmodified native binaries. To ease adoption, HFI proposes incremental changes to existing high-performance processors.
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Generalized Power Attacks against Crypto Hardware using Long-Range Deep Learning
Karel Král
Marina Zhang
Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (TCHES), IACR (2024)
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To make cryptographic processors more resilient against side-channel attacks, engineers have developed various countermeasures. However, the effectiveness of these countermeasures is often uncertain, as it depends on the complex interplay between software and hardware. Assessing a countermeasure’s effectiveness using profiling techniques or machine learning so far requires significant expertise and effort to be adapted to new targets which makes those assessments expensive. We argue that including cost-effective automated attacks will help chip design teams to quickly evaluate their countermeasures during the development phase, paving the way to more secure chips.In this paper, we lay the foundations toward such automated system by proposing GPAM, the first deep-learning system for power side-channel analysis that generalizes across multiple cryptographic algorithms, implementations, and side-channel countermeasures without the need for manual tuning or trace preprocessing. We demonstrate GPAM’s capability by successfully attacking four hardened hardware-accelerated elliptic-curve digital-signature implementations. We showcase GPAM’s ability to generalize across multiple algorithms by attacking a protected AES implementation and achieving comparable performance to state-of-the-art attacks, but without manual trace curation and within a limited budget. We release our data and models as an open-source contribution to allow the community to independently replicate our results and build on them.
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In-DRAM Stochastic and Approximate Counting (DSAC) is a recently published algorithm that aims to mitigate Rowhammer at low cost. Existing in-DRAM counter-based schemes keep track of row activations and issue Targeted Row Refresh (TRR) upon detecting a concerning pattern. However, due to insufficiency of the tracking ability they are vulnerable to attacks utilizing decoy rows. DSAC claims to improve upon existing TRR mitigation by filtering out decoy-row accesses, so they cannot saturate the limited number of counters available for detecting Rowhammer, promising a reliable mitigation without the area cost of deterministic and provable schemes such as per-row activation counting (PRAC).
In this paper, we analyze DSAC and discover some gaps that make it vulnerable to Rowhammer and Rowpress attacks. The main focus of this work is a novel attack named SoothSayer that targets the counter replacement policy in DSAC by cloning the random number generator. We describe and simulate this attack, and establish its efficacy. Finally, we discuss other weaknesses in DSAC.
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Pathfinder: High-Resolution Control-Flow Attacks with Conditional Branch Predictor
Andrew Kwong
Archit Agarwal
Christina Garman
Daniel Genkin
Dean Tullsen
Deian Stefan
Hosein Yavarzadeh
Max Christman
Mohammadkazem Taram
International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, ACM (2024)
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This paper presents novel attack primitives that provide adversaries with the ability to read and write the path history register (PHR) and the prediction history tables (PHTs) of the conditional branch predictor in modern Intel CPUs. These primitives enable us to recover the recent control flow (the last 194 taken branches) and, in most cases, a nearly unlimited control flow history of any victim program. Additionally, we present a tool that transforms the PHR into an unambiguous control flow graph, encompassing the complete history of every branch. This work provides case studies demonstrating the practical impact of novel reading and writing/poisoning primitives. It includes examples of poisoning AES to obtain intermediate values and consequently recover the secret AES key, as well as recovering a secret image by capturing the complete control flow of libjpeg routines. Furthermore, we demonstrate that these attack primitives are effective across virtually all protection boundaries and remain functional in the presence of all recent control-flow mitigations from Intel.
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Downfall: Exploiting Speculative Data Gathering
USENIX Security Symposium, USENIX (2023)
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We introduce Downfall attacks, new transient execution attacks that undermine the security of computers running everywhere across the internet. We exploit the gather instruction on high-performance x86 CPUs to leak data across boundaries of user-kernel, processes, virtual machines, and trusted execution environments. We also develop practical and end-to-end attacks to steal cryptographic keys, program’s runtime data, and even data at rest (arbitrary data). Our findings, exploitation techniques, and demonstrated attacks defeat all previous defenses, calling for critical hardware fixes and security updates for widely-used client and server computers.
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