SOSP '11 Proceedings of the Twenty-Third ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles
Düppel: retrofitting commodity operating systems to mitigate cache side channels in the cloud
Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGSAC conference on Computer & communications security
Cloudoscopy: services discovery and topology mapping
Proceedings of the 2013 ACM workshop on Cloud computing security workshop
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Multi-tenant cloud, which features utility-like computing resources to tenants in a "pay-as-you-go" style, has been commercially popular for years. As one of the sole purposes of such a cloud is maximizing resource usages to increase its revenue, it usually uses virtualization to consolidate VMs from different and even mutually-malicious tenants atop a powerful physical machine. This, however, also enables a malicious tenant to steal security-critical information such as crypto keys from victims, due to the shared physical resources such as caches. In this paper, we show that stealing crypto keys in a virtualized cloud may be a real threat by evaluating a cache-based side-channel attack against an encryption process. To mitigate such attacks while not notably degrading performance, we propose an approach that leverages dynamic cache coloring: when an application is doing security-sensitive operations, the VMM is notified to swap the associated data to a safe and isolated cache line. This approach may eliminate cache-based side-channel for security-critical operations, yet ensure efficient resource sharing during normal operations. We demonstrate the applicability by illustrating a preliminary implementation based on Xen and its performance overhead.