Amplifying Main Memory-Based Timing Covert and Side Channels using Processing-in-Memory Operations

The adoption of processing-in-memory (PiM) architectures has been gaining momentum because they provide high performance and low energy consumption by alleviating the data movement bottleneck. Yet, the security of such architectures has not been thoroughly explored. The adoption of PiM solutions provides a new way to directly access main memory, which can be potentially exploited by malicious user applications. We show that this new way to access main memory opens opportunities for high-throughput timing attack vectors that are hard-to-mitigate without significant performance overhead. We introduce IMPACT, a set of high-throughput main memory-based timing attacks that leverage characteristics of PiM architectures to establish covert and side channels. IMPACT enables high-throughput communication and private information leakage. To achieve this, IMPACT (i) eliminates expensive cache bypassing steps required by processor-centric main memory and cache-based timing attacks and (ii) leverages the intrinsic parallelism of PiM operations. First, we showcase two covert-channel attack variants that run on the host CPU and leverage PiM architectures to gain direct and fast access to main memory and establish high-throughput communication covert channels. Second, we showcase a side-channel attack on a DNA sequence analysis application that leaks the private characteristics of a user's sample genome by leveraging PiM operations. Our results demonstrate that (i) our covert channels achieve up to 14.16 Mb/s communication throughput, which is 6.38x faster than the state-of-the-art main memory-based covert channels, and (ii) our side-channel attack allows the attacker to determine the properties of a sample genome at a throughput of 7.5 Mb/s with 96% accuracy. We discuss and evaluate several countermeasures for IMPACT to enable secure and robust PiM architectures.