iLeakage: Browser-based Timerless Speculative Execution Attacks on Apple Devices

Abstract

Over the past few years, the high-end CPU market is undergoing a transformational change. Moving away from using x86 as the sole architecture for high performance devices, we have witnessed the introduction of heavy-weight Arm CPUs computing devices. Among these, perhaps the most influential was the introduction of Apple's M-series architecture, aimed at completely replacing Intel CPUs in the Apple ecosystem. However, while significant effort has been invested analyzing x86 CPUs, the Apple ecosystem remains largely unexplored.

In this paper, we set out to investigate the resilience of the Apple ecosystem to speculative side-channel attacks. We first establish the basic toolkit needed for mounting side-channel attacks, such as the structure of caches and CPU speculation depth. We then tackle Apple's degradation of the timer resolution in both native and browser-based code. Remarkably, we show that distinguishing cache misses from cache hits can be done without time measurements, replacing timing based primitives with timerless counterparts based on race conditions. Finally, we use our distinguishing primitive to construct eviction sets and mount Spectre attacks, all while avoiding the use of timers.

We then evaluate Safari's side-channel resilience. We bypass the compressed 35-bit addressing and the value poisoning countermeasures, creating a primitive that can speculatively read and leak any 64-bit address within Safari's rendering process. Combining this with a new method for consolidating websites from different domains into the same renderer process, we demonstrate end-to-end attacks leaking sensitive information, such as passwords, inbox content, and locations from popular services such as Google.