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Congratulations to Wei Huang on his paper on Aion attacks

Aion attacks are a brand new class of attacks that exploit the lack of a software timer in the SGX trusted execution environment. Many proposed side-channel defenses rely on precise timing, that is normally attained through a software timer. Wei’s work shows that these timers can be manipulated by an attacker, rendering any defense that relies on a software timer useless. Wei shows this works with a variety of attacks, from causing cache misses to triggering thermal management mechanisms on the processor. Read all about Aion attacks in the preprint.