How secure is your cache against side-channel attacks?

Zecheng He, Ruby B. Lee

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

67 Scopus citations

Abstract

Security-critical data can leak through very unexpected side channels, making side-channel attacks very dangerous threats to information security. Of these, cache-based side-channel attacks are some of the most problematic. This is because caches are essential for the performance of modern computers, but an intrinsic property of all caches - the different access times for cache hits and misses - is the property exploited to leak information in time-based cache side-channel attacks. Recently, different secure cache architectures have been proposed to defend against these attacks. However, we do not have a reliable method for evaluating a cache's resilience against different classes of cache side-channel attacks, which is the goal of this paper. We first propose a novel probabilistic information flow graph (PIFG) to model the interaction between the victim program, the attacker program and the cache architecture. From this model, we derive a new metric, the Probability of Attack Success (PAS), which gives a quantitative measure for evaluating a cache's resilience against a given class of cache side-channel attacks. We show the generality of our model and metric by applying them to evaluate nine different cache architectures against all four classes of cache side-channel attacks. Our new methodology, model and metric can help verify the security provided by different proposed secure cache architectures, and compare them in terms of their resilience to cache side-channel attacks, without the need for simulation or taping out a chip.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationMICRO 2017 - 50th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture Proceedings
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages341-353
Number of pages13
ISBN (Electronic)9781450349529
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 14 2017
Event50th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, MICRO 2017 - Cambridge, United States
Duration: Oct 14 2017Oct 18 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual International Symposium on Microarchitecture, MICRO
VolumePart F131207
ISSN (Print)1072-4451

Other

Other50th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, MICRO 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityCambridge
Period10/14/1710/18/17

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Hardware and Architecture

Keywords

  • Cache
  • Quantification
  • Security modeling
  • Side-channel attack

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