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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • The problem is that so many browsers leverage hardware acceleration and offer access to the GPUs. So yes, the browsers could fix the issue, but the underlying cause is the way GPUs handle data that the attack is leveraging. Fixing it would likely involve not using hardware acceleration.

    As these patterns are processed by the iGPU, their varying degrees of redundancy cause the lossless compression output to depend on the secret pixel. The data-dependent compression output directly translates to data-dependent DRAM traffic and data-dependent cache occupancy. Consequently, we show that, even under the most passive threat model—where an attacker can only observe coarse-grained redundancy information of a pattern using a coarse-grained timer in the browser and lacks the ability to adaptively select input—individual pixels can be leaked. Our proof-of-concept attack succeeds on a range of devices (including computers, phones) from a variety of hardware vendors with distinct GPU architectures (Intel, AMD, Apple, Nvidia). Surprisingly, our attack also succeeds on discrete GPUs, and we have preliminary results indicating the presence of software-transparent compression on those architectures as well.

    It sounds distantly similar to some of the canvas issues where the acceleration creates different artifacts which makes it possible to identify GPUs and fingerprint the browsers.




























  • This was the intent of the inquiries.

    However, I think the title is a bit misleading. I wouldn’t say the research is “buckling”. It’s definitely been a headache, and sure there are some people who would rather not deal with the ever-increasing death threats, but that applies to many areas of research.

    The question is how they’re going to try and stop funding research into this. The research around this is especially important from a national security perspective, because it’s become easier than ever to slide propaganda into social media and news media. If you’ve got enough resources, you can likely sway elections even easier than before.