Covert Channels on GPGPUs

Abstract

GPUs are increasingly used to accelerate the performance of not only graphics workloads, but also data intensive applications. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of covert channels in General Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs). We consider the possibility of two colluding malicious applications using the GPGPU as a covert channel to communicate, in the absence of a direct channel between them. Such a situation may arise in cloud environments, or in environments employing containment mechanisms such as dynamic information flow tracking. We reverse engineer the block placement algorithm to understand co-residency of blocks from different applications on the same Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) core, or on different SMs concurrently. In either mode, we identify the shared resources that may be used to create contention. We demonstrate the bandwidth of two example channels: one that uses the L1 constant memory cache to enable communication on the same SM, and another that uses the L2 constant memory caches to enable communication between different SMs. We also examine the possibility of increasing the bandwidth of the channel by using the available parallelism on the GPU, achieving a bandwidth of over 400 Kbps. This study demonstrates that GPGPUs are a feasible medium for covert communication.