PCG: Mitigating Conflict-based Cache Side-channel Attacks with Prefetching

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Jiang, Fang, Tong, Fei, Wang, Hongyu, Cheng, Xiaoyu, Zhou, Zhe, Ling, Ming, Mao, Yuxing
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Jiang, Fang
Tong, Fei
Wang, Hongyu
Cheng, Xiaoyu
Zhou, Zhe
Ling, Ming
Mao, Yuxing
author_facet Jiang, Fang
Tong, Fei
Wang, Hongyu
Cheng, Xiaoyu
Zhou, Zhe
Ling, Ming
Mao, Yuxing
contents To defend against conflict-based cache side-channel attacks, cache partitioning or remapping techniques were proposed to prevent set conflicts between different security domains or obfuscate the locations of such conflicts. But such techniques complicate cache design and may result in significant performance penalties. Therefore, there have been lightweight prefetching-based schemes proposed to introduce noise to confuse attackers' observation. However, we have validated experimentally that relying on prefetching to only introduce noise is insufficient, as attackers can still reliably distinguish the victim's cache accesses. This paper proposes a novel prefetching-based scheme, called PCG. It combines adding victim-irrelevant cache occupancy changes and reducing victim-relevant cache occupancy changes to disrupt attackers by generating noisy and indistinguishable cache access patterns. Additionally, PCG can either work independently or seamlessly be integrated with most of the commonly used prefetchers. We have implemented and evaluated PCG in both gem5 and the open-source RISC-V core BOOMv3. The evaluation results show the PCG's robust security superior to the existing solutions, while without resulting in significant performance degradation. According to the evaluation based on the SPEC CPU 2017 benchmark suite, PCG even shows an average performance improvement of about 1.64%. Moreover, it incurs only 1.26% overhead on hardware resource consumption.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_03217
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PCG: Mitigating Conflict-based Cache Side-channel Attacks with Prefetching
Jiang, Fang
Tong, Fei
Wang, Hongyu
Cheng, Xiaoyu
Zhou, Zhe
Ling, Ming
Mao, Yuxing
Cryptography and Security
Hardware Architecture
To defend against conflict-based cache side-channel attacks, cache partitioning or remapping techniques were proposed to prevent set conflicts between different security domains or obfuscate the locations of such conflicts. But such techniques complicate cache design and may result in significant performance penalties. Therefore, there have been lightweight prefetching-based schemes proposed to introduce noise to confuse attackers' observation. However, we have validated experimentally that relying on prefetching to only introduce noise is insufficient, as attackers can still reliably distinguish the victim's cache accesses. This paper proposes a novel prefetching-based scheme, called PCG. It combines adding victim-irrelevant cache occupancy changes and reducing victim-relevant cache occupancy changes to disrupt attackers by generating noisy and indistinguishable cache access patterns. Additionally, PCG can either work independently or seamlessly be integrated with most of the commonly used prefetchers. We have implemented and evaluated PCG in both gem5 and the open-source RISC-V core BOOMv3. The evaluation results show the PCG's robust security superior to the existing solutions, while without resulting in significant performance degradation. According to the evaluation based on the SPEC CPU 2017 benchmark suite, PCG even shows an average performance improvement of about 1.64%. Moreover, it incurs only 1.26% overhead on hardware resource consumption.
title PCG: Mitigating Conflict-based Cache Side-channel Attacks with Prefetching
topic Cryptography and Security
Hardware Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.03217