As we increasingly rely on computers to process and manage our personal data, safeguarding sensitive information from malicious hackers is a fast growing concern. Among many forms of information leakage, covert timing channels operate by establishing an illegitimate communication channel between two processes and through transmitting information via timing modulation, thereby violating the underlying system's security policy. Recent studies have shown the vulnerability of popular computing environments, such as cloud computing, to these covert timing channels. In this work, we propose a new micro architecture-level framework, CC-Hunter, that detects the possible presence of covert timing channels on shared hardware. Our experiments demonstrate that Chanter is able to successfully detect different types of covert timing channels at varying bandwidths and message patterns.
{"title":"CC-Hunter: Uncovering Covert Timing Channels on Shared Processor Hardware","authors":"Jie Chen, Guru Venkataramani","doi":"10.1109/MICRO.2014.42","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MICRO.2014.42","url":null,"abstract":"As we increasingly rely on computers to process and manage our personal data, safeguarding sensitive information from malicious hackers is a fast growing concern. Among many forms of information leakage, covert timing channels operate by establishing an illegitimate communication channel between two processes and through transmitting information via timing modulation, thereby violating the underlying system's security policy. Recent studies have shown the vulnerability of popular computing environments, such as cloud computing, to these covert timing channels. In this work, we propose a new micro architecture-level framework, CC-Hunter, that detects the possible presence of covert timing channels on shared hardware. Our experiments demonstrate that Chanter is able to successfully detect different types of covert timing channels at varying bandwidths and message patterns.","PeriodicalId":6591,"journal":{"name":"2014 47th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture","volume":"552 1","pages":"216-228"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86989976","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
As shared last level caches are widely used in many-core CMPs to boost system performance, partitioning a large shared cache among multiple concurrently running applications becomes increasingly important in order to reduce destructive interference. However, while recent works start to show the promise of using replacement-based partitioning schemes, such existing schemes either suffer from the severe associativity degradation when the number of partitions is high, or lack the ability to precisely partition the whole cache which leads to decreased resource efficiency. In this paper, we propose Futility Scaling (FS), a novel replacement-based cache partitioning scheme that can precisely partition the whole cache while still maintaining high associativity even with a large number of partitions. The futility of a cache line represents the uselessness of this line to application performance and can be ranked in different ways by various policies, e.g., LRU and LFU. The idea of FS is to control the size of a partition by properly scaling the futility of its cache lines. We study the properties of FS on both associativity and sizing in an analytical framework, and present a feedback-based implementation of FS that incurs little overhead in practice. Simulation results show that, FS improves performance over previously proposed Vantage and Prism by up to 6.0% and 13.7%, respectively.
{"title":"Futility Scaling: High-Associativity Cache Partitioning","authors":"Ruisheng Wang, Lizhong Chen","doi":"10.1109/MICRO.2014.46","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MICRO.2014.46","url":null,"abstract":"As shared last level caches are widely used in many-core CMPs to boost system performance, partitioning a large shared cache among multiple concurrently running applications becomes increasingly important in order to reduce destructive interference. However, while recent works start to show the promise of using replacement-based partitioning schemes, such existing schemes either suffer from the severe associativity degradation when the number of partitions is high, or lack the ability to precisely partition the whole cache which leads to decreased resource efficiency. In this paper, we propose Futility Scaling (FS), a novel replacement-based cache partitioning scheme that can precisely partition the whole cache while still maintaining high associativity even with a large number of partitions. The futility of a cache line represents the uselessness of this line to application performance and can be ranked in different ways by various policies, e.g., LRU and LFU. The idea of FS is to control the size of a partition by properly scaling the futility of its cache lines. We study the properties of FS on both associativity and sizing in an analytical framework, and present a feedback-based implementation of FS that incurs little overhead in practice. Simulation results show that, FS improves performance over previously proposed Vantage and Prism by up to 6.0% and 13.7%, respectively.","PeriodicalId":6591,"journal":{"name":"2014 47th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture","volume":"35 1","pages":"356-367"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89311480","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}