Abstract
The isolation among physically co-located virtual machines is an important prerequisite for ensuring the security in a virtualized environment (VE). The VE should prevent from exploitation of side-channels stemming from the usage of shared resources, being hardware or software. However, despite the presumed secure logical isolation, a possible information leakage beyond the boundaries of a virtual machine due to side-channel exploits is a key concern in the VE. Such exploits have been demonstrated in the academic world during the last years. This paper takes into consideration the side-channel attacks threat, and points out that the feasibility of a SCA strongly depends on the specific context of the execution environment. The paper proposes a framework for feasibility assessment of SCAs using cache-based exploits as an example scenario. Furthermore, we provide a proof of concept to show how the feasibility of cache-based SCAs can be assessed using the proposed approach.
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Research supported by TU Darmstadt’s project LOEWE- CASED and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Graduiertenkolleg 1362 - DFG GRK 1362.
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Vateva-Gurova, T., Luna, J., Pellegrino, G., Suri, N. (2015). On the Feasibility of Side-Channel Attacks in a Virtualized Environment. In: Obaidat, M., Holzinger, A., Filipe, J. (eds) E-Business and Telecommunications. ICETE 2014. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 554. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25915-4_17
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