Random Fill Cache Architecture

Correctly functioning caches have been shown to leak critical secrets like encryption keys, through various types of cache side-channel attacks. This nullifies the security provided by strong encryption and allows confidentiality breaches, impersonation attacks and fake services. Hence, future cache...

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Veröffentlicht in:2014 47th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture S. 203 - 215
Hauptverfasser: Fangfei Liu, Lee, Ruby B.
Format: Tagungsbericht
Sprache:Englisch
Veröffentlicht: IEEE 01.12.2014
Schlagworte:
cache
cache collision attacks
Computer architecture
Encryption
Hardware
secure caches
security
side channel attacks
Timing
ISSN:1072-4451
Online-Zugang:Volltext
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Zusammenfassung:Correctly functioning caches have been shown to leak critical secrets like encryption keys, through various types of cache side-channel attacks. This nullifies the security provided by strong encryption and allows confidentiality breaches, impersonation attacks and fake services. Hence, future cache designs must consider security, ideally without degrading performance and power efficiency. We introduce a new classification of cache side channel attacks: contention based attacks and reuse based attacks. Previous secure cache designs target only contention based attacks, and we show that they cannot defend against reuse based attacks. We show the surprising insight that the fundamental demand fetch policy of a cache is a security vulnerability that causes the success of reuse based attacks. We propose a novel random fill cache architecture that replaces demand fetch with random cache fill within a configurable neighborhood window. We show that our random fill cache does not degrade performance, and in fact, improves the performance for some types of applications. We also show that it provides information-theoretic security against reuse based attacks.
ISSN:1072-4451
DOI:10.1109/MICRO.2014.28