Comment by jprx

Comment by jprx 4 days ago

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 4 days ago

Any plans to make lecture videos available as well?

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brcmthrowaway 4 days ago

Do you support arm64e?

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jprx 4 days ago

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...?)

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