WOOT '14 - Tick Tock: Building Browser Red Pills from Timing Side Channels

Tick Tock: Building Browser Red Pills from Timing Side Channels

Grant Ho and Dan Boneh, Stanford University; Lucas Ballard and Niels Provos, Google

Red pills allow programs to detect if their execution environment is a CPU emulator or a virtual machine. They are used by digital rights management systems and by malware authors. In this paper, we study the possibility of browser-based red pills, namely red pills implemented as Javascript that runs in the browser and attempts to detect if …

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