On the detection of applications in co-resident virtual machines via a memory deduplication side-channel

Abstract

Nowadays, hosting services of multiple customers on the same hardware via virtualiation techniques is very common. Memory deduplication allows to save physical memory by merging identical memory pages of multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) running on the same host. However, this mechanism can leak information on memory pages to other. In this paper, we propose a timing-based side-channel to identify software versions running in co-resident VMs. The attack tests whether pages that are unique to a specific software version are present in co-resident VMs. We evaluate the attack in a setting without background load and in a more realistic setting with significant background load on the host memory. Our results indicate that, with few repetitions of our attack, we can precisely identify software versions within reasonable time frames and nearly independent of the background load. Finally, we discuss potential coun-termeasures against the presented side-channel attack.