Yes, the posited attacker is an unprivileged spy process sharing a cache with the victim. The FLUSH+RELOAD cache-timing algorithm they use relies on a shared ca

Yes, the posited attacker is an unprivileged spy process sharing a cache with the victim. The FLUSH+RELOAD cache-timing algorithm they use relies on a shared cache. See section 2.2. Of course, there may be other ways to extract the same data remotely. Bernstein's earlier paper[1] demonstrating cache-timing attacks on AES over the network is an example. He sent many packets of different sizes to evict different lines from cache. Compared to FLUSH+RELOAD, Bernstein's technique is extremely low-resolution; I don't believe anyone has ever demonstrated it against a typical, real-world server configuration. [1] https://cr.yp.to/antiforgery/cachetiming-20050414.pdf https://cr.yp.to/antiforgery/cachetiming-20050414.pdf