Microarchitecture Exploitation


CSE 466 - Fall 2025.

Modern CPUs are impressive feats of engineering effort. Consistently offering performance improvements every generation, but how? This module explores security vulnerabilities that can lurk hidden, below the assembly, in CPU architecture itself!

Note: Meltdown challenges must be performed inside the VM!



Challenges

This challenge is optional, it will not count towards dojo completion.

Get started with interacting with processes via shared memory.

This challenge is optional, it will not count towards dojo completion.

Get started with interacting with processes via shared memory.

Get started with a binary that side-channels itself!

A binary that side-channels itself, now using multiple pages.

Measure memory access timings to leak the flag via a side-channel.

Perform a full flush and reload side-channel attack!

This binary never reads the flag bytes.. or does it?

Use a speculative bounds check bypass which accesses a page mapped in userspace to leak the flag.

Use a speculative indirect call which accesses a page mapped in userspace to leak the flag.

Use meltdown to read the flag from the kernel module's memory. Note - This challenge must be executed inside the VM!

Leak the flag via meltdown from another process after getting the address of its task_struct from the kernel module and using it to find and walk its page tables. Note - This challenge must be executed inside the VM!


30-Day Scoreboard:

This scoreboard reflects solves for challenges in this module after the module launched in this dojo.

7-Day | 30-Day | All-Time

Hackers Crews
Rank Hacker Badges Score