Mitigating Access-Driven Timing Channels in Clouds using StopWatch

• Main Authors: LI, Peng, GAO, Debin, Reiter, Michael K.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2013
• Subjects: Information Security
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/2038; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/3037/viewcontent/dsn13.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

This paper presents StopWatch , a system that defends against timing-based side-channel attacks that arise from coresidency of victims and attackers in infrastructure-as-a-service clouds. StopWatchtriplicates each cloud-resident guest virtual machine (VM) and places replicas so that the three replicas of a guest VM are coresident with nonoverlapping sets of (replicas of) other VMs. StopWatch uses thetiming of I/O events at a VM's replicas collectively to determine the timings observed by each one or by an external observer, so that observable timing behaviors are similarly likely in the absence of any other individual, coresident VM. We detail the design and implementation of StopWatch in Xen, evaluate the factors that influence its performance, and address the problem of placing VM replicas in a cloudunder the constraints of StopWatch so as to still enable adequate cloud utilization.