Metior: A Comprehensive Model to Evaluate Obfuscating Side-Channel Defense Schemes
Peter W. Deutsch, Weon Taek Na, Thomas Bourgeat, Joel Emer, Mengjia Yan · 2023
Microarchitectural side-channels enable an attacker to exfiltrate information via the observable side-effects of a victim's execution. Obfuscating mitigation schemes have recently gained in popularity for their appealing performance characteristics. These schemes, including randomized caches and DRAM traffic shapers, limit, but do not completely eliminate, side-channel leakage. An important (yet under-explored) research challenge is the quantitative study of the security effectiveness of these schemes, identifying whether these obfuscating schemes help increase the security level of a system, and if so, by how much.