Trinetra: a solution to handle cross-VM time-driven attack

Abstract

The efficient utilization of hardware and software resources plays a vital role in a high-performance computing environment. Where on the one side, a shared pool of resources facilitates faster processing with limited resources, this mechanism also widens the scope of many kinds of security attacks on the other side. Side-channel attack (SCA) is one such attack where methods to monitor the activity of exploited shared resource is carried out to extract the private key. One such SCA, branch prediction analysis attack, launched with time-driven attack (TDA) method is considered in this paper. With the consideration of the virtualization environment, proposal of an algorithm Trinetra, to detect the presence of cross-VM TDA, is the primary focus of our paper. We have tested the performance of Trinetra with experimental analysis in addition to the attack simulation. Performance evaluation has found the Trinetra very effective with negligible performance overhead.