A covert channel construction in a virtualized environment

Authors:
Jidong Xiao;Zhang Xu;Hai Huang;Haining Wang
Affiliations:
The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, USA;The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, USA;IBM T.J.Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY, USA;The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, USA
Venue:
Proceedings of the 2012 ACM conference on Computer and communications security
Year:
2012

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Abstract

Memory deduplication has been widely used in various commodity hypervisors. However, while this technique improves memory efficiency, it has an impact on system security. In particular, memory deduplication is usually implemented using a variant of copy-on-write techniques, for which, writing to a shared page would incur a longer access time than those non-shared. By exploiting this artifact, we demonstrate a new covert channel can be built in a virtualized environment.