GhostCache: Timer- and Counter-Free Cache Attacks Exploiting Weak Coherence on RISC-V and ARM Chips

Microarchitectural side-channel attacks, which have become increasingly prevalent, often rely on high-resolution timers. Emerging processor architectures have sought to mitigate these vulnerabilities by restricting access to fine-grained timers. In this work, we verify the widespread existence of weak coherence in L1 cache on multiple RISC chips, exploit it to bypass this type of mitigation and propose GhostCache, which constructs timer-free and counter-free instruction cache attacks. It introduces two novel and widely applied attack primitives, Modify+Recall and Call+ModifyCall, which are applicable to both RISC-V and ARM architectures and affect 6 commercial and 3 open-source large RISC processors. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first demonstration of timer-free and counter-free cache attacks on RISC-V processors. We also identify undisclosed features, such as the next-three-line prefetching mechanism and direct forwarding of evicted instructions from data cache to instruction cache. Furthermore, we develop four types of covert channels, achieving up to 1.68 MB/s with a 0.01% error rate. For side-channel attacks, GhostCache enables three types of timer-free real-world attacks. The first is an end-to-end website fingerprinting attack, achieving 92.02% accuracy across 100 website classes. The second is a set of kernel leakage attacks, including the discovery of a new Spectre disclosure gadget via a function pointer to leak arbitrary kernel data at 92.91% accuracy. We also launched an attack to reconstruct cryptographic keys. Lastly, we propose potential countermeasures to address these vulnerabilities in both RISC-V and ARM architectures.