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Timing Attack Experiments against Scudo (Part 2)

Attempting Timing Attacks against Scudo

In this second blog post we will take a different approach for attacking Scudo , i.e. we will try to the measure execution times for calls to malloc and hope to be able to derive a portion of the internal state of the allocator (i.e. perform side channel attacks). The version of Scudo considered in this blog post is 161cca266a9d0b6deb5f1fd2de8ad543649a7fa1 .

There will be almost only negative results (which means I unfortunately could not make it work), except for one. The main conclusion we can draw from this post is that Scudo is not designed to mitigate timing attacks! This follows from trying to leak a piece of information and then accidentally leaking a different and unclassified piece.

22 minutes to read
Pascal Kühnemann