To extract a secret from the cache, one must first ensure the slate is clean.
Lin Tao knelt at the boundary of his two-hundred-and-fifty-six tile probe array, his woolen coat laid out flat across the smooth floor. The air inside the white cube remained a steady twenty-one degrees. But Lin Tao’s hands were warm, blood circulating briskly through his fingers as he prepared the execution set.
In cache side-channel attacks, Lin Tao reviewed, the Flush+Reload primitive needs three distinct, timed together stages. Stage One: Flush. Stage Two: Speculate. Stage Three: Reload and Time.
Lin Tao carried out Stage One.
He took his heavy traveling coat and dragged it systematically across the entire forty-meter strip of probe tiles. By pressing the rough wool fabric against the zero-drag floor and dragging it with steady, deliberate force, he forced the physics engine to calculate thousands of nonstop micro-collisions across the entire array.
The massive influx of temporary crash data overwhelmed the small L1 and L2 caches, evicting the probe tiles from the fast memory banks.
The probe array was now fully cold. Every single tile, if accessed, would result in a slow, high-latency cache miss requiring nearly twenty split seconds to resolve.
Lin Tao folded his coat and set it aside, his movements calm, fluid, and economical.
