Remix.run Logo
Remix clone Hacker News
new | show | ask | jobsGithub
▲ brcmthrowaway 2 days ago

Does this include Spectre?

▲jprx 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yes!

Our labs include building your own real spectre attack against the kernel, bypassing ASLR and building ROP chains with various side channels, finding and exploiting backdoors in a RISC-V CPU by building a hardware fuzzer, and more.

(source: I designed the Spectre lab plus a few others)

All our labs are fully open source for anyone to try: https://github.com/MATCHA-MIT/SHD-StarterCode

If you give them a try, please do let us know what you think! We genuinely want these activities to be fun and approachable (we designed them like a big CTF) and welcome feedback from the community.

▲SilverSlash a day ago | parent | next [-]

Any plans to make lecture videos available as well?

▲brcmthrowaway a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Do you support arm64e?

▲jprx 20 hours ago | parent [-]

We teach using Intel X86_64 CPUs for a variety of reasons

- Most academic research has been done on Intel systems, so it's easier for students reading papers to relate to their experiences in the labs

- X86_64 provides convenient cache flush and cycle measurement instructions in userspace

- Intel's strongly ordered memory model and cache inclusion policy makes cross-core side channels simpler to reason about

- Practically, it's easier to scale up server infrastructure on Intel (you can do most of the labs on inexpensive Intel-based Linux systems)

- For Rowhammer, our students attack one particular kind of DRAM that we have profiled and know works well with our machines

- Note that AMD's cache inclusion policy differs from Intel's- we only support Intel chips for now

Down the road I could see us moving to ARM for a few labs (perhaps a future PACMAN attack lab...?)

▲LPisGood 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It starts with necessary background into cache side channels and covers transient execution attacks like Spectre.