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When machine learning tells the wrong story
A story about side-channel attacks, computer architecture, and how I unexpectedly got my start in academia.
Onstage with my co-author Jules Drean, we gave a 15-minute talk about our hardware security research paper, There’s Always a Bigger Fish: A Clarifying Analysis of a Machine-Learning-Assisted Side-Channel Attack, that had taken the majority of my last two years at MIT to complete. 9 This is why your computer might get hot or turn on a fan when you have a lot of applications open: when your CPU scales its frequency up, it performs more operations in a fixed amount of time, generating more heat due to the increased electrical activity. Even relatively small changes in counter values can reveal the victim website!It turns out that on Linux, where we were running these experiments, you can monitor system interrupts very easily.
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