Non-monopolizable caches: Low-complexity mitigation of cache side channel attacks

  • Authors:
  • Leonid Domnitser;Aamer Jaleel;Jason Loew;Nael Abu-Ghazaleh;Dmitry Ponomarev

  • Affiliations:
  • State University of New York at Binghamton, Binghamton;Intel Corporation, VSSAD;State University of New York at Binghamton, Binghamton;State University of New York at Binghamton, Binghamton;State University of New York at Binghamton, Binghamton

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization (TACO) - HIPEAC Papers
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

We propose a flexibly-partitioned cache design that either drastically weakens or completely eliminates cache-based side channel attacks. The proposed Non-Monopolizable (NoMo) cache dynamically reserves cache lines for active threads and prevents other co-executing threads from evicting reserved lines. Unreserved lines remain available for dynamic sharing among threads. NoMo requires only simple modifications to the cache replacement logic, making it straightforward to adopt. It requires no software support enabling it to automatically protect pre-existing binaries. NoMo results in performance degradation of about 1% on average. We demonstrate that NoMo can provide strong security guarantees for the AES and Blowfish encryption algorithms.