Rt-sniper: A low-overhead defense mechanism pinpointing cache side-channel attacks

Minkyu Song, Junyeon Lee, Taeweon Suh, Gunjae Koo

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    1 Citation (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Since cache side-channel attacks have been serious security threats to multi-tenant systems, there have been several studies to protect systems against the attacks. However, the prior studies have limitations in determining only the existence of the attack and/or occupying too many computing resources in runtime. We propose a low-overhead pinpointing solution, called RT-Sniper, to overcome such limitations. RT-Sniper employs a two-level filtering mechanism to minimize performance overhead. It first monitors hardware events per core and isolates a suspected core to run a malicious process. Then among the processes running on the selected core, RT-Sniper pinpoints a malicious process through a per-process monitoring approach. With the core-level filtering, RT-Sniper has an advantage in overhead compared to the previous works. We evaluate RT-Sniper against Flush+Reload and Prime+Probe attacks running SPEC2017, LMBench, and PARSEC benchmarks on multi-core systems. Our evaluation demonstrates that the performance overhead by RT-Sniper is negligible (0.3% for single-threaded applications and 2.05% for multi-threaded applications). Compared to the previous defense solutions against cache side-channel attacks, RT-Sniper exhibits better detection performance with lower performance overhead.

    Original languageEnglish
    Article number2748
    JournalElectronics (Switzerland)
    Volume10
    Issue number22
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2021 Nov 1

    Bibliographical note

    Publisher Copyright:
    © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

    Keywords

    • Cache side-channel attacks
    • Malware detection
    • Overhead
    • Security

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Control and Systems Engineering
    • Signal Processing
    • Hardware and Architecture
    • Computer Networks and Communications
    • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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