Wait a minute! A fast, Cross-VM attack on AES

Gorka Irazoqui; Mehmet Sinan Inci; Thomas Eisenbarth; Berk Sunar

Paper 2014/435

Wait a minute! A fast, Cross-VM attack on AES

Gorka Irazoqui, Mehmet Sinan Inci, Thomas Eisenbarth, and Berk Sunar

Abstract

In cloud computing, efficiencies are reaped by resource sharing such as co-location of computation and deduplication of data. This work exploits resource sharing in virtualization software to build a powerful cache-based attack on AES. We demonstrate the vulnerability by mounting Cross-VM Flush+Reload cache attacks in VMware VMs to recover the AES keys of OpenSSL 1.0.1 running inside the victim VM. Furthermore, the attack works in a realistic setting where different VMs are located on separate cores. The modified flush+reload attack we present, takes only in the order of seconds to minutes to succeed in a cross-VM setting. Therefore long term co-location, as required by other fine grain attacks in the literature, are not needed. The results of this study show that there is a great security risk to OpenSSL AES implementation running on VMware cloud services when the deduplication is not disabled.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Publication info: Published elsewhere. Minor revision. Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses Symposium - RAID 2014
Contact author(s): teisenbarth @ wpi edu
History: 2014-11-20: revised; 2014-06-12: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2014/435
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2014/435,
      author = {Gorka Irazoqui and Mehmet Sinan Inci and Thomas Eisenbarth and Berk Sunar},
      title = {Wait a minute! A fast, Cross-{VM} attack on {AES}},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2014/435},
      year = {2014},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/435}
}