# Revisiting Main Memory-Based Covert and Side Channel Attacks in the Context of Processing-in-Memory

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.11284 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11284/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Apr 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [SoK: A Systems Perspective on Compound AI Threats and Countermeasures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13459/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce IMPACT, a set of high-throughput main memory-based timing attacks that leverage characteristics of processing-in-memory (PiM) architectures to establish covert and side channels. IMPACT enables high-throughput communication and private information leakage by exploiting the shared DRAM row buffer. To achieve high throughput, IMPACT (i) eliminates expensive cache bypassing steps required by processor-centric memory-based timing attacks and (ii) leverages the intrinsic parallelism of PiM operations. We showcase two applications of IMPACT. First, we build two covert channels that leverage different PiM approaches (i.e., processing-near-memory and processing-using-memory) to establish high-throughput covert communication channels. Our covert channels achieve 8.2 Mb/s and 14.8 Mb/s communication throughput, respectively, which is 3.6x and 6.5x higher than the state-of-the-art main memory-based covert channel. Second, we showcase a side-channel attack that leaks private information of concurrently-running victim applications with a low error rate. Our source-code is openly and freely available at https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/IMPACT.