Co-resident attack on public cloud infrastructures

• Main Author: Toh, Jabrian Yuzhou
• Other Authors: Ta Nguyen Binh Duong
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Computer systems organization::Performance of systems
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/75737
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

With the demand of resources constantly growing, cloud service providers such as Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure allowed clients to run Virtual Machines (VMs) on a shared physical infrastructure. While the use of multi-tenancy gave a wide range of advantages, it also introduces the risk of sharing a physical server with a potential malicious VM. Although past works had conducted studies regarding on the ways to improve VM allocation policies and how side channels can be built to extract information from VMs, there have been a lack of studies on co-residency vulnerabilities. This project focuses how co-location as well as co-residency detection is done, so as to prevent this kind of attack in the future. There are many ways to detect co-residency, however this project explains the method called Memory Bus Locking. A web application was implemented to help people better understand how Memory Bus Locking is use to detect co-residency. This web application shows the difference in performance when locking as well as when different workloads were performed. The web application main objective is to reduce the time needed to run certain codes and programs as well as the complexity of the setup before running.