Meet the Sherlock Holmes’ of Side Channel Leakage: A Survey of Cache SCA Detection Techniques

Ayaz Akram,Vianney Lapotre,Maria Mushtaq,Guy Gogniat,Muhammad Khurram Bhatti

doi:10.1109/access.2020.2980522

Abstract

Cache Side Channel Attacks (SCAs) have gained a lot of attention in the recent past. Since, these attacks exploit the caching hardware vulnerabilities, they are fast and dangerous. Detection of cache side channel attacks is an important step towards mitigating against such hostile entities. Researchers have already proposed different techniques to detect cache side channel attacks. This paper provides a detailed survey of literature related to the state-of-the-art detection techniques for cache based side channel attacks. We identify a set of important characteristics that can be used to characterize a CSCA (cache side channel attack) detection technique. We use the identified features to compare and contrast the most important detection techniques and provide the important observations. We also identify some of the challenges that the research community will have to resolve in future to improve the efficiency of cache side channel detection techniques. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to do such a study. We believe that this paper will prove useful to researchers in the area of systems security.

Highlights

Information security is becoming a major concern with each passing day as innovative and smart security attacks keep on appearing
OUTLOOK This work is the first effort to perform a detailed survey of Cache side channel attack (CSCA) detection techniques proposed in the last decade or so
We have identified a broad set of criterion to characterize the research works on CSCA detection

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Information security is becoming a major concern with each passing day as innovative and smart security attacks keep on appearing. Significant amount of research has been performed in the field of cryptography leading to the development of different crypto-algorithms like ECC, AES, RSA, and ElGamal etc These algorithms are very hard to break and require enormous computing power. Cache side channel attack (CSCA) is a special type of SCA in which a malicious process deduces secret information of a victim process by observing its use of caching hardware [19]. We focus on Cache Side Channel Attacks (CSCAs) in Intel’ x86 Architecture based processors. Contributions: This paper presents a survey of techniques that have been proposed to detect cache based side channel attacks. We classify these techniques into different categories based on their design characteristics. Only CSCAs in x86 architecture are considered, while they have shown to be possible on other architectures (like ARM) as well

BACKGROUND

SURVEY OF CSCA DETECTION TECHNIQUES

TRENDS IN CSCA DETECTION

Findings

CONCLUSION AND FUTURE OUTLOOK