ShowTime: CPU Timing Attacks With the Human Eye
summary
ShowTime presents a concrete framework that converts tiny microarchitectural leaks into huge, observable delays and proves humans can visually distinguish them. It builds conversion routines (out‑of‑order leg comparison, eviction encoding) and single‑shot amplifiers (PLRU tree trick and the prefetchnta loop) that turn a cache hit vs miss into milliseconds of delay; a live demo and a 15‑person test yield ~98.4% detection and amplification up to 10× timing differences, and eviction sets form in seconds even with coarse timers.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00CPU timing attacks intro
- 1:06Microarchitectural attacks overview
- 3:35Goal of timing side-channel
- 7:04Single-shot amplification
- 8:49Tree-based cache replacement
- 13:03Prefetch amplifier for cross-core
- 17:57Human-perceptible timing demo
- 22:32Out-of-order conversion routines
- 28:33Advanced eviction set creation
- 31:19Timer granularity limits
- 34:08Mitigation limitations
- 34:48Q&A
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