Defense against Cache-Based Side Channel Attacks for secure cloud computing
Munish Chouhan, Halabi Hasbullah · Malaysian Technical Universities Conference on Engineering and Technology 2015 · 2015
Cloud computing is a combination of various established technologies like virtualization, dynamic elasticity, Broad band Internet, etc. to provide computer configurable resources as a service to the world. Resources are shared among many distrusting clients by abstracting the underlying infrastructure using virtualization. While this system has many practical benefits, this resource sharing raises a threat of cache based side channel attack. In this paper, a solution is proposed to detect and prevent guest Virtual Machines (VM) from Cache based Side Channel Attack. Cache usage is analyzed in this solution to detect side channel attack and a notification channel is introduced to enable cloud service provide to run prevention mechanism if any attack is detected with the preapproval of client. Cache decay mechanism is used for introducing noise in cache to minimize information leakage through side channel and noise also to blind attacker from analyzing any activity or cache access pattern by any program.