Virtualization Technology: Cross-VM Side Channel Attacks Make it Vulnerable

Date
2015-12-18
Authors
Litchfield, A
Shahzad, A
Supervisor
Item type
Conference Contribution
Degree name
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS)
Abstract

Cloud computing provides an effective business model for the deployment of IT infrastructure, platform, and software services. Often, facilities are outsourced to cloud providers and this offers the service consumer virtualization technologies without the added cost burden of development. However, virtualization introduces serious threats to service delivery such as Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, Cross-VM Cache Side Channel attacks, Hypervisor Escape and Hyper-jacking. One of the most sophisticated forms of attack is the cross-VM cache side channel attack that exploits shared cache memory between VMs. A cache side channel attack results in side channel data leakage, such as cryptographic keys. Various techniques used by the attackers to launch cache side channel attack are presented, as is a critical analysis of countermeasures against cache side channel attacks.

Description
Keywords
Cloud Computing; Virtualization; Security; Cross-VM Cache Side Channels
Source
Presented at the Australasian Conference on Information Systems 2015 ( arXiv:1606.01356)
DOI
Rights statement
Copyright: © 2015 AT Litchfield and A Shahzad. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Australia License, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and ACIS are credited.