Colored Petri Net Based Cache Side Channel Vulnerability Evaluation

Limin Wang,Zhanpeng Wang,Ziyuan Zhu,Dan Meng

doi:10.1109/access.2019.2955282

Abstract

The cache side channel leakage is a very serious security issue in the information security field. In order to solve this problem, a large number of security mechanisms have been applied to protect the cache. However, there are very limited methods we can choose to evaluate the cache side channel vulnerability, therefore, it is hard to know whether our system configuration or applied security mechanisms make caches more resistant to the cache side channel attacks. In this paper, we proposed a colored Petri net based method to model and score the cache side channel vulnerability. When given a side channel attack and related security mechanisms, our method utilized colored Petri net to model the requirements and the attack steps of cache attacks. Then we calculated the probability of success for each attack step according to the requirements and the computer environment, and the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) was used to help us score the attack steps. Based on these probabilities and CVSS scores, we finally obtained a total risk score, which represented the threat level of the cache attacks in a specified computer environment with certain security mechanisms. This paper focused on the typical cache attacks and security mechanisms, and our experiments showed that we can conveniently evaluate and compare the threat level of cache attacks in the computer environment with different security mechanisms.

Highlights

Encryption is usually used to prevent confidential data leakage, and the ciphers generated by the complex encryption algorithm are difficult to crack through traditional cryptanalysis techniques [1]
We propose a new quantitative approach to score the degree of threat of cache attacks in the computer environment with different security mechanisms
Most of the cache side channel attacks can be divided into three attack steps [13], in this paper, we will focus on four typical traditional cache side channel attacks and two new cache attacks

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Encryption is usually used to prevent confidential data leakage, and the ciphers generated by the complex encryption algorithm are difficult to crack through traditional cryptanalysis techniques [1]. The simulators based cache side channel vulnerability quantification methods mentioned above are easy to operate, it takes too much time to collect and write attack programs, in addition, performing the experiment and collecting necessary data are slow [10] To solve this problem, other works use the abstract cache model to analyze the side channel vulnerability, abstract models contain and only contain the essential features of attacker, victim, and security countermeasures. (3) Based on the probability and weight, we calculate the total risk score of the cache attacks With this quantitative method, we can answer the first question that what security mechanisms are more resistant to the cache side channel attacks and the second question that what is the threat level of different cache side channel attacks in the computer environment with specified system configurations or security mechanisms. The attack steps and both the probability and weight will be modeled as a three-step colored Petri net model

BACKGROUND

WEIGHT OF A SUCCESSFUL ATTACK STEP

RESULT

CONCLUSION