Previous work already showed limited information leakage caused by the Intel RAPL interface. With interfaces like Intel RAPL, physical access is not required anymore as the measurements can be accessed directly from software. Using an oscilloscope, the attacker monitors the energy consumption of the device. With classical power side-channel attacks, an attacker typically has physical access to a victim device.

Using this technique, we recover RSA keys processed by mbed TLS from an SGX enclave. In our work, we combine PLATYPUS with precise execution control of SGX-Step.ДЄs a result, we overcome the hurdle of the limited measuring capabilities of Intel RAPL by repeatedly executing single instructions inside the SGX enclave. With SGX, Intel released a security feature to create isolated environments, so-called enclaves, that are secure even if the operating system is compromised. PLATYPUS can further infer intra-cacheline control flow of applications, break KASLR, leak AES-NI keys from Intel SGX enclaves and the Linux kernel, and establish a timing-independent covert channel.

Using PLATYPUS, we demonstrate that we can observe variations in the power consumption to distinguish different instructions and different Hamming weights of operands and memory loads, allowing inference of loaded values.

Likewise to the Platypus that uses its ability to find food even in complete darkness, we sense secrets in the processor's energy measurements using Intel RAPL. While they are mammals, they also lay eggs, and males can detect electrical signals with their bill.

Intel power gadget windows