Author of the paper here; AMA.

BTW, project summary is here https://www.pwnshow.com/investigations/INV-006/

I would recommend having a look at advanced side-channel PCIe bus DMA taps used by game cheats. They use a second computer along with an external HDMI mask-overlay mixer, to dump the target computers internal game-engine state through unencrypted DMA access to the overlay channel. Thus, gives the cheaters x-ray vision and aim-bot features for games protected by kernel level anti-cheat software.

Highly entertaining nuisance users. =3

Does this work with IOMMU?

it would be at a low enough level to reprogram IOMMU unless a hypervisor will prevent it.

if you have a hypervisor you can prevent the other to do the dma freely in memory because u can use iommu and things like amd-vi to separate it good. but if you dont have the hv below it, any devices with dma can do the duty across entire ram.

Unknown, but there were a few obvious bios options I saw that are needed to make the kits performant with some systems.

I still find it absurd people would go that far to cheat at a game. =3

> I still find it absurd people would go that far to cheat at a game. =3

I guess it turns the cheating into its own meta-game!

True, but a blacklisted $5k GPU seems like a bit of a risk. =3

In comparing xen to qubes bulletins does the vastly different user count affect the analysis?

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While user count can affect absolute disclosure volume it does not drive the main comparison in my paper. What I do is to use Xen advisories to measure upstream dependence: how much of the Qubes public advisory record is attributable to Xen/CPU/upstream components rather than Qubes core logic? That attribution result is internal to the Qubes record, so it is much less sensitive to Xen’s much larger user base.

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