Mastik: A Micro-Architectural Side-Channel Toolkit

About

Micro-architectural side-channel attacks exploit contention on internal components of the processor to leak information between processes. While in theory such attacks are straightforward, practical implementations tend to be finicky and require significant understanding of poorly documented processor features and other domain-specific arcane knowledge. Consequently, there is a barrier to entry into work on micro-architectural side-channel attacks, which hinders the development of the area and the analysis of the resilience of existing software against such attacks.

This repository contains Mastik, a toolkit for experimenting with micro-architectural side-channel attacks. Mastik aims to provide implementations of published attack and analysis techniques. Currently, Mastik supports six side-channel attack techniques on the Intel x86-64 architecture:

• Prime+Probe on several caches, including
  • L1 data cache
  • L1 instruction
  • L2 (only with huge pages)
  • Last Level Cache+Probe
• Prime+Abort
• Flush+Reload
• Flush+Flush
• Two variants of CacheBleed
• Performance-degradation attack

Installation

Mastik follows the de-facto standard Linux installation process. If the system has all of the required software and you want the default configuration, use:
$ ./configure && make && sudo make install

See below for more information.

Required packages

For the core operation, Mastik does not require any packages. However, the ability to resolve symbols in binaries is extremely useful, and requires the build packages binutils and libdwarf on Linux.
On Mac OS X there is no support for debugging symbols yet.

The Mastik GUI interface doubloon requires Python 3 with the following packages: wx, numpy, paramiko, matplotlib, and tqdm.

Installation depends on the flavour of the Operating System.

Fedora: $ sudo dnf install binutils-devel libdwarf-devel

Ubuntu: $ sudo apt-get install binutils-dev libdwarf-dev libelf-dev

CentOS:
Enable the PowerTools repository:
$ sudo dnf config-manager --set-enabled PowerTools
Then install the packages:
$ sudo dnf install libdwarf binutils-devel elfutils-libelf-devel libdwarf-devel python3

Configuring the build directory

To set up the build environment, use the configure script. To use the default options, use:

$ ./configure

The script accepts several flags to modify its behaviour. Some of these are listed below. Use ./configure --help for a complete list.

Flag	Description
--help	Help message
--prefix=PREFIX	Install files in PREFIX [/usr/local]
--disable-symbols	Disables handling of symbol tables in binaries. Also, removes requirement for binutils and libdwarf
--disable-debug-symbols	Disable handling of debug symbols in binaries. Removes requirement for libdwarf
--disable-doubloon	Do not install doubloon. Removes requirement for Python3

Building Mastik

After configuring the build environment, build Mastik using:

$ make

Installing Mastik

To install Mastik, use:

$ make install

To change the install directory use:

$ make prefix=DIR install

Usage

For example of usage look at the demo folder.

Thanks

Mastik is supported by:

• An ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (project number DE200101577)
• An ARC Discovery Project (project number DP210102670)
• The Blavatnik ICRC at Tel-Aviv University
• Data61, CSIRO
• a gift from Intel