ARM TrustZone Hacked By Abusing Power Management (acolyer.org)

"This is brilliant and terrifying in equal measure," writes the Morning Paper. Long-time Slashdot reader phantomfive writes: Many CPUs these days have DVFS (Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling), which allows the CPU's clockspeed and voltage to vary dynamically depending on whether the CPU is idling or not. By turning the voltage up and down with one thread, researchers were able to flip bits in another thread. By flipping bits when the second thread was verifying the TrustZone key, the researchers were granted permission. If number 'A' is a product of two large prime numbers, you can flip a few bits in 'A' to get a number that is a product of many smaller numbers, and more easily factorable.
"As the first work to show the security ramifications of energy management mechanisms," the researchers reported at Usenix, "we urge the community to re-examine these security-oblivious designs."

Comments

Re:Would the Rust programming language help?

[radish]

Not in this case. Rust (and similar programming approaches) prevent accidental interference between threads (of the same application) at the code execution layer - i.e. they prevent bugs due to programming errors. This attack is happening at the hardware level - the threads in question could be completely different applications and could be written in any language.