On Fri, Jan 05, 2018 at 09:24:31PM +0100, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 05, 2018 at 07:58:04PM +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
> > and the techniques
> > to deal with rdtsc disabling are well known and used in other existing
> > attacks.
>
> Yes i've tested one of them for the spectre poc, but it really did not
> work well, leading to about 1 among 10 bytes only to be valid. In fact
> either you run the counter thread on the other sibling of the same core
> and it significantly perturbates the local activity, or you run it on
> another core, and the time it takes to retrieve the time requires some
> L1+L2 traversal. I'm not saying it doesn't work at all, I'm saying that
> the accuracy is highly degraded and that can turn something 100%
> reproducible into something requiring a long time to run, making the
> attack more noticeable (and possibly letting observed data degrade
> during the period).
So I worked on an improved RDTSC emulation (attached) and it works
reasonably well on the spectre poc found online. Its accuracy is almost
as good as rdtsc on my i7-6700k on two threads running on the same core,
and 8-10 times worse on two distinct cores, but still leads to ~50%
success rate on the PoC. So my conclusion now is that it's indeed
pointless to invest time trying to make RDTSC less accessible/accurate.
Willy
/*
* Evaluation of alternatives to rdtsc - 2018-01-06 - Willy Tarreau
<w...@1wt.eu>
*
* Observation on core-i7 6700k @4.4 GHz :
* - 2 threads, same core:
* hard resolution (local) ~= 28-30 cycles
* soft resolution (remote) ~= 29 cycles
*
* - 2 distinct cores:
* hard resolution (local) ~= 27-28 cycles
* soft resolution (remote) ~= 180-260 cycles
*/
#include <pthread.h>
#include <signal.h>
#include <stdarg.h>
#include <stdint.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#define MAXLOG 10000000
static volatile uint64_t softtsc;
static uint64_t t0, t1, harddur, softdur, hardamp, softamp;
static uint64_t hardlog[MAXLOG];
static uint64_t softlog[MAXLOG];
static pthread_t thr;
static int hardcnt, softcnt;
static inline uint64_t rdtsc()
{
uint32_t a, d;
__asm__ volatile("rdtsc" : "=a" (a), "=d" (d));
return a + ((uint64_t)d << 32);
}
void *run_softtsc(void *arg)
{
register __attribute__((unused)) uint64_t c = 0;
/* best resolution so far : 29 cycles */
__asm__ volatile(".align 16\n"
"1:\n"
"mov %0, %1\n"
"inc %0\n"
"sfence\n"
"jmp 1b\n"
: "+r"(c) : "m"(softtsc));
/* 36-37 cycles */
while (1) {
//__asm__ volatile("incq %0\nsfence" :: "m"(softtsc));
//__asm__ volatile("addq $1,%0\nsfence" :: "m"(softtsc));
//softtsc = c++;
//__asm__ volatile("sfence"/* ::: "memory"*/);
softtsc++;
}
}
/* display the message and exit with the code */
__attribute__((noreturn)) void die(int code, const char *format, ...)
{
va_list args;
va_start(args, format);
vfprintf(stderr, format, args);
va_end(args);
exit(code);
}
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
int err;
int log;
err = pthread_create(&thr, NULL, &run_softtsc, NULL);
if (err != 0)
die(1, "cannot create thread");
pthread_detach(thr);
t0 = rdtsc();
for (log = 0; log < MAXLOG; log++)
hardlog[log] = rdtsc();
t1 = rdtsc();
harddur = t1 - t0;
hardamp = hardlog[MAXLOG-1] - hardlog[0];
hardcnt = t0 = 0;
for (log = 0; log < MAXLOG; log++) {
if (t0 != hardlog[log]) {
hardcnt++;
t0 = hardlog[log];
}
}
t0 = rdtsc();
for (log = 0; log < MAXLOG; log++)
softlog[log] = softtsc;
t1 = rdtsc();
softdur = t1 - t0;
softamp = softlog[MAXLOG-1] - softlog[0];
//pthread_kill(thr, SIGKILL);
//pthread_join(thr, NULL);
softcnt = t0 = 0;
for (log = 0; log < MAXLOG; log++) {
if (t0 != softlog[log]) {
softcnt++;
t0 = softlog[log];
}
}
printf("hard: duration=%Lu cycles amplitude=%Lu values=%Lu
resolution=%Lu\n",
(unsigned long long)harddur, (unsigned long long)hardamp,
(unsigned long long)hardcnt, (unsigned long
long)harddur/hardcnt);
printf("soft: duration=%Lu cycles amplitude=%Lu values=%Lu
resolution=%Lu\n",
(unsigned long long)softdur, (unsigned long long)softamp,
(unsigned long long)softcnt, (unsigned long
long)softdur/softcnt);
//for (log = 0; log < MAXLOG; log++)
// printf("%d %Lu %Lu\n", log, (unsigned long long)hardlog[log],
(unsigned long long)softlog[log]);
exit (0);
}
