Hand Me Your Secret, MCU - Microarchitectural Timing Attacks on Microcontrollers Are Practical

Explore a groundbreaking Black Hat conference talk that challenges the prevailing notion of microcontroller (MCU) security. Delve into a novel class of microarchitectural timing side-channel attacks affecting MCUs, which are widely used in embedded and IoT devices. Learn how researchers Sandro Pinto and Cristiano Rodrigues unveil vulnerabilities in these seemingly simple microarchitectures, previously thought to be resilient to attacks like Spectre and Meltdown. Discover the implications of these findings for the billions of MCUs shipped annually and gain insights into the evolving landscape of systems security. Examine the potential impact on security boundaries in processors and explore the untapped potential of hidden transient states created by shared microarchitectural resources.