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CacheRascal: Defending the Flush-Reload Side-Channel Attack in PaaS Clouds

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Wireless Algorithms, Systems, and Applications (WASA 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 10251))

Abstract

The phenomenon that different instances in the cloud reside on the same physical machine is defined as co-residence. Co-residence introduces the risk of side-channel attacks, which utilize the shared resources to gain useful information. Flush-Reload attack is one of the cache-based side-channel attacks that are usually used to extract the victim process’s sensitive information such as private keys. We propose a defense scheme called CacheRascal to mitigate the Flush-Reload attack in the PaaS clouds. CacheRascal can automatically detect the execution of security-critical modules and initiate protection through cache confusion within 1 ms. It does not need to make any changes to the existing PaaS clouds and is easy to deploy. The experiment results show that our defense scheme effectively obfuscates the cache and incurs performance overhead of less than 2%.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Here “instance” refers to a service unit provided to the tenants by the cloud providers, e.g., a container or a virtual machine.

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Acknowledgement

This paper was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant No. 61100228 and the project Core Electronic Devices, High-end Generic Chips and Basic Software (No. 2015ZX01029101-001).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Information Security, Institute of Information Engineering, CAS, Beijing, China

    Weijuan Zhang, Xiaoqi Jia & Mingsheng Wang

  2. School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Weijuan Zhang, Xiaoqi Jia, Jianwei Tai & Mingsheng Wang

  3. Key Laboratory of Network Assessment Technology, CAS, Beijing, China

    Weijuan Zhang, Xiaoqi Jia & Jianwei Tai

  4. Beijing Key Laboratory of Network Security and Protection Technology, Beijing, China

    Weijuan Zhang, Xiaoqi Jia & Jianwei Tai

Authors
  1. Weijuan Zhang
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  2. Xiaoqi Jia
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  3. Jianwei Tai
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  4. Mingsheng Wang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xiaoqi Jia .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Texas, USA

    Liran Ma

  2. New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, New Jersey, USA

    Abdallah Khreishah

  3. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Yan Zhang

  4. University of North Georgia, Dahlonega, Georgia, USA

    Mingyuan Yan

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Zhang, W., Jia, X., Tai, J., Wang, M. (2017). CacheRascal: Defending the Flush-Reload Side-Channel Attack in PaaS Clouds. In: Ma, L., Khreishah, A., Zhang, Y., Yan, M. (eds) Wireless Algorithms, Systems, and Applications. WASA 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10251. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60033-8_57

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60033-8_57

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-60032-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-60033-8

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