TY - GEN

T1 - Towards a framework for assessing the feasibility of side-channel attacks in virtualized environments

AU - Vateva-Gurova, T.

AU - Luna, J.

AU - Pellegrino, G.

AU - Suri, Neeraj

PY - 2014/8/28

Y1 - 2014/8/28

N2 - Physically co-located virtual machines should be securely isolated from one another, as well as from the underlying layers in a virtualized environment. In particular the virtualized environment is supposed to guarantee the impossibility of an adversary to attack a virtual machine e.g., by exploiting a side-channel stemming from the usage of shared physical or software resources. However, this is often not the case and the lack of sufficient logical isolation is considered a key concern in virtualized environments. In the academic world this view has been reinforced during the last years by the demonstration of sophisticated side-channel attacks (SCAs). In this paper we argue that the feasibility of executing a SCA strongly depends on the actual context of the execution environment. To reflect on these observations, we propose a feasibility assessment framework for SCAs using cache based systems as an example scenario. As a proof of concept we show that the feasibility of cache-based side-channel attacks can be assessed following the proposed approach.

AB - Physically co-located virtual machines should be securely isolated from one another, as well as from the underlying layers in a virtualized environment. In particular the virtualized environment is supposed to guarantee the impossibility of an adversary to attack a virtual machine e.g., by exploiting a side-channel stemming from the usage of shared physical or software resources. However, this is often not the case and the lack of sufficient logical isolation is considered a key concern in virtualized environments. In the academic world this view has been reinforced during the last years by the demonstration of sophisticated side-channel attacks (SCAs). In this paper we argue that the feasibility of executing a SCA strongly depends on the actual context of the execution environment. To reflect on these observations, we propose a feasibility assessment framework for SCAs using cache based systems as an example scenario. As a proof of concept we show that the feasibility of cache-based side-channel attacks can be assessed following the proposed approach.

KW - Feasibility analysis

KW - Feasibility factors

KW - Security classifications

KW - Side-channel attacks

KW - Java programming language

KW - Execution environments

KW - Feasibility assessment

KW - Security classification

KW - Side channel attack

KW - Software resources

KW - Virtualized environment

KW - Virtual reality

M3 - Conference contribution/Paper

SN - 9781467392402

SP - 113

EP - 124

BT - 2014 11th International Conference on Security and Cryptography (SECRYPT)

PB - IEEE

ER -