Düppel: retrofitting commodity operating systems to mitigate cache side channels in the cloud

  • Authors:
  • Yinqian Zhang;Michael K. Reiter

  • Affiliations:
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, N. Carolina, USA;University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, N. Carolina, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGSAC conference on Computer & communications security
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a system called Düppel that enables a tenant virtual machine to defend itself from cache-based side-channel attacks in public clouds. Düppel includes defenses for time-shared caches such as per-core L1 and L2 caches. Experiments in the lab and on public clouds show that Düppel effectively obfuscates timing signals available to an attacker VM via these caches and incurs modest performance overheads (at most 7% and usually much less) in the common case of no side-channel attacks. Moreover, Düppel requires no changes to hypervisors or support from cloud operators.