Hidden in Plain Sight: Scriptless Microarchitectural Attacks via TrueType Font Hinting

Leon Trampert, Michael Schwarz

Microarchitectural attacks threaten system security and privacy, especially if they can be mounted without native code execution. Recent research has shown that such attacks are possible from within web browsers via JavaScript and WebAssembly. Moreover, recent works have demonstrated that 'scriptless' attacks, using only CSS, can be leveraged for side-channel attacks, including cache contention and user fingerprinting. In this paper, we introduce a new class of scriptless attacks that use the hinting instructions embedded within TrueType font files. We show that the hinting language is sufficiently robust to craft cache attacks, demonstrating cache-contention attacks and precise L1 Prime+Probe attacks. We demonstrate a website fingerprinting attack, as well as a method to track which page of a PDF is currently displayed. Our results demonstrate the practicality of font-based scriptless attacks in real-world scenarios. This emphasizes the need for future mitigations that go beyond traditional scripting languages.