Collected research

Fantastic Timers and Where to Find Them: High-Resolution Microarchitectural Attacks in JavaScript

Michael Schwarz, Clémentine Maurice, Daniel Gruss and Stefan Mangard · misc0110.net

Browsers coarsened performance.now to stop JavaScript cache attacks; this work recovers nanosecond resolution anyway from implicit clocks such as postMessage, MessageChannel, Broadcast Channel, CSS animations and a SharedArrayBuffer counting thread, plus interpolation and edge thresholding. The revived timers restore cache side channels and drive a DRAM covert channel out of an isolated VM.

Record

Researcher

Michael Schwarz, Clémentine Maurice, Daniel Gruss and Stefan Mangard

Published by

misc0110.net

Format

Whitepaper

Topic

Server

In the archive

• Collected in the 2016–17 research round

Tags

• timing-attack
• side-channel
• javascript
• postmessage
• css
• measurement-study
• mitigation

This page is the archive's own catalogue record. The research is the work of Michael Schwarz, Clémentine Maurice, Daniel Gruss and Stefan Mangard, first published at the original source. Preserved copies are kept so the citation survives its host; this one was last captured on 11 August 2026.