LazyFP: Leaking FPU Register State using Microarchitectural Side-Channels

Abstract

Modern processors utilize an increasingly large register set to facilitate efficient floating point and SIMD computation. This large register set is a burden for operating systems, as its content needs to be saved and restored when the operating system context switches between tasks. As an optimization, the operating system can defer the context switch of the FPU and SIMD register set until the first instruction is executed that needs access to these registers. Meanwhile, the old content is left in place with the hope that the current task might not use these registers at all. This optimization is commonly called lazy FPU context switching. To make it possible, a processor offers the ability to toggle the availability of instructions utilizing floating point and SIMD registers. If the instructions are turned off, any attempt of executing them will generate a fault. In this paper, we present an attack that exploits lazy FPU context switching and allows an adversary to recover the FPU and SIMD register set of arbitrary processes or VMs. The attack works on processors that transiently execute FPU or SIMD instructions that follow an instruction generating the fault indicating the first use of FPU or SIMD instructions. On operating systems using lazy FPU context switching, the FPU and SIMD register content of other processes or virtual machines can then be reconstructed via cache side effects. With SIMD registers not only being used for cryptographic computation, but also increasingly for simple operations, such as copying memory, we argue that lazy FPU context switching is a dangerous optimization that needs to be turned off in all operating systems, if there is a chance that they run on affected processors.