Yuval Yarom
More info
- Affiliation
- University of Adelaide, Data61
- Known for
- Flush+Reload, Spectre, CacheBleed
The researcher behind Flush+Reload, the cache attack that became a building block for much of modern side-channel work.
Yarom spent years in industry before doing his PhD in Adelaide. In 2014 he and Katrina Falkner published Flush+Reload: an attacker who shares memory pages with the victim — a common library, say — flushes a cache line and then times how quickly it can be read back. A fast read means the victim touched it. Using the technique they pulled a private key out of GnuPG by watching which code paths ran.
Flush+Reload became the measuring stick in Spectre, which Yarom co-authored, and in many of the cache timing attacks that followed. In 2016 came CacheBleed, which showed that even cache-bank conflicts within a single line leaked key material from OpenSSL.