Can randomized mapping secure instruction caches from side-channel attacks?

Fangfei Liu, Hao Wu, Ruby B. Lee

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Information leakage through cache side channels is a serious threat in computer systems. The leak of secret cryptographic keys voids the protections provided by strong cryptography and software virtualization. Past cache side channel defenses focused almost entirely on data caches. Recently, instruction cache based side-channel attacks have been demonstrated to be practical- even in a Cloud Computing environment across two virtual machines. Unlike data caches, instruction caches leak information through secret-dependent execution paths. In this paper, we propose to use a classification matrix to quantitatively characterize the vulnerability of an instruction cache to software side channel attacks. We use this quantitative analysis to answer the open question: can randomized mapping proposed for thwarting data cache side channel attacks secure instruction caches? We further study the performance impact of the randomized mapping approach for the instruction cache.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationHardware and Architectural Support for Security and Privacy, HASP 2015
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
ISBN (Electronic)9781450334839
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 14 2015
Event4th International Workshop on Hardware and Architectural Support for Security and Privacy, HASP 2015 - Portland, United States
Duration: Jun 14 2015 → …

Publication series

NameACM International Conference Proceeding Series
Volume14-June-2015

Other

Other4th International Workshop on Hardware and Architectural Support for Security and Privacy, HASP 2015
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityPortland
Period6/14/15 → …

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Computer Networks and Communications

Keywords

  • Cache side channel
  • Randomized mapping
  • SVM

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