Paper 2019/167

Analysis of Secure Caches and Timing-Based Side-Channel Attacks

Shuwen Deng and Wenjie Xiong and Jakub Szefer

Abstract

Many secure cache designs have been proposed in literature with the aim of mitigating different types of cache timing-based side-channel attacks. However, there has so far been no systematic analysis of how these secure cache designs can, or cannot, protect against different types of the timing-based attacks. To provide a means of analyzing the caches, this paper first presents a novel three-step modeling approach to exhaustively enumerate all the possible cache timing-based side-channel vulnerabilities. The model covers not only attacks that leverage cache accesses or flushes from the local processor core, but also attacks that leverage changes in the cache state due to the cache coherence protocol actions from remote cores. Moreover, both conventional attacks and speculative execution attacks are considered. With the list of all possible cache timing side-channel vulnerabilities derived from the three-step model, this work further analyzes each of the existing secure cache designs to show which types of timing-based side-channel vulnerabilities each secure cache can mitigate. Based on the security analysis of the existing secure cache designs, this paper further summaries different techniques gleaned from the secure cache designs and the technique’s ability help mitigate different types of cache timing-based side-channel vulnerabilities.