The eventual goal of our research is to develop a principled design for comprehensively mitigating access-driven timing channels in modern compute clouds, particularly of the "infrastructure as a service" (IaaS) variety. This type of cloud permits the cloud customer to deploy arbitrary guest virtual machines (VMs) to the cloud. The security of the cloud-resident guest VMs depends on the virtual machine monitor (VMM), e.g., Xen, to adequately isolate guest VMs from one another. While modern VMMs are designed to logically isolate guest VMs, there remains the possibility of timing "side channels" that permit one guest VM to learn information about another guest VM simply by observing features that reflect the others' effects on the hardware platform. Such attacks are sometimes referred to as "access-driven" timing attacks.
TEAM
PI: Michael Reiter (UNC) Student: Yinqian Zhang, Peng Li
A Science of Timing Channels in Modern Cloud Environments