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CC-Hunter: Uncovering Covert Timing Channels on Shared Processor Hardware

Published: 13 December 2014 Publication History

Abstract

As we increasingly rely on computers to process and manage our personal data, safeguarding sensitive information from malicious hackers is a fast growing concern. Among many forms of information leakage, covert timing channels operate by establishing an illegitimate communication channel between two processes and through transmitting information via timing modulation, thereby violating the underlying system's security policy. Recent studies have shown the vulnerability of popular computing environments, such as cloud computing, to these covert timing channels. In this work, we propose a new micro architecture-level framework, CC-Hunter, that detects the possible presence of covert timing channels on shared hardware. Our experiments demonstrate that Chanter is able to successfully detect different types of covert timing channels at varying bandwidths and message patterns.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)On The Effect of Replacement Policies on The Security of Randomized Cache ArchitecturesProceedings of the 19th ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3634737.3637677(483-497)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
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  • (2022)Microarchitectural Attacks in Heterogeneous Systems: A SurveyACM Computing Surveys10.1145/354410255:7(1-40)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2022
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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
MICRO-47: Proceedings of the 47th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture
December 2014
697 pages
ISBN:9781479969982

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IEEE Computer Society

United States

Publication History

Published: 13 December 2014

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Author Tags

  1. Algorithms
  2. Covert timing channels
  3. Detection
  4. Shared hardware

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  • Research
  • Refereed limited

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MICRO-47
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MICRO-47 Paper Acceptance Rate 53 of 279 submissions, 19%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 484 of 2,242 submissions, 22%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)On The Effect of Replacement Policies on The Security of Randomized Cache ArchitecturesProceedings of the 19th ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3634737.3637677(483-497)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
  • (2023)CLEPSYDRACACHEProceedings of the 32nd USENIX Conference on Security Symposium10.5555/3620237.3620349(1991-2008)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2023
  • (2022)Microarchitectural Attacks in Heterogeneous Systems: A SurveyACM Computing Surveys10.1145/354410255:7(1-40)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2022
  • (2022)Fast, Robust and Accurate Detection of Cache-Based Spectre Attack PhasesProceedings of the 41st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design10.1145/3508352.3549330(1-9)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2022
  • (2021)Streamline: a fast, flushless cache covert-channel attack by enabling asynchronous collusionProceedings of the 26th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems10.1145/3445814.3446742(1077-1090)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2021
  • (2021)Leaky buddiesProceedings of the 48th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture10.1109/ISCA52012.2021.00080(972-984)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2021
  • (2020)Exploring Branch Predictors for Constructing Transient Execution TrojansProceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems10.1145/3373376.3378526(667-682)Online publication date: 9-Mar-2020
  • (2019)CycloneProceedings of the 52nd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture10.1145/3352460.3358273(57-72)Online publication date: 12-Oct-2019
  • (2019)GPUGuardProceedings of the ACM International Conference on Supercomputing10.1145/3330345.3330389(497-509)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2019
  • (2019)EraseMeProceedings of the 2019 Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI10.1145/3299874.3318027(319-322)Online publication date: 13-May-2019
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