Availability under threat - CXL Type 3 Vulnerability Assessment

Abstract

The growing demand for data processing, driven by technologies such as artificial intelligence, has led the industry to seek more efficient solutions. The Compute Express Link (CXL) protocol stands out as a promising option, offering high-speed, low-latency interconnections between the CPU and other devices, thereby improving resource management, and facilitating the scaling of data-intensive applications. A case study of how the availability of a system could be compromised through a DoS attack targeting the CXL protocol is presented. The context of this work is based on a controlled, secure, and dedicated environment for this research. At no point is a real system/server compromised, and the study is based on the Next Generation Intel® Xeon Server CPU and a CXL type 3 test card. Established in 2019 and publishing the first official specification of the CXL protocol, called CXL 1.0, in March 2020, The CXL Consortium is an open industry standards group established to create technical specifications that enable groundbreaking performance for new usage models, while also supporting an open ecosystem for data center accelerators and other high-speed enhancements. Considering that the protocol is relatively young compared to other protocols, such as PCIe (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), the "threat modeling" methodology will be followed to identify vulnerabilities that could potentially compromise the system's availability.