Exploiting Configurability as a Defense against Cache Side Channel Attacks

Chenxi Dai, Tosiron Adegbija

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

Caches have significant impact on an embedded system's performance and energy consumption. As a result, much prior research has focused on cache optimizations to minimize energy consumption and improve performance. Caches are also highly susceptible to side channel attacks, wherein an attacker analyzes leaked information from side channels to extract private information. A key challenge of security mechanisms is that they incur overheads, which can potentially impede optimization goals. Since configurability has been widely studied as a viable and effective cache optimization, we explore using configurability as a moving target defense against cache side channel attacks, while minimizing the attendant overheads of designing secure caches. We present experimental results to show that using configurability as a defense mechanism is very promising, and present future research directions towards enabling secure caches through configurability.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2017 IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI, ISVLSI 2017
EditorsRicardo Reis, Mircea Stan, Michael Huebner, Nikolaos Voros
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages495-500
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9781509067626
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 20 2017
Externally publishedYes
Event2017 IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI, ISVLSI 2017 - Bochum, North Rhine-Westfalia, Germany
Duration: Jul 3 2017Jul 5 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings of IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI, ISVLSI
Volume2017-July
ISSN (Print)2159-3469
ISSN (Electronic)2159-3477

Conference

Conference2017 IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI, ISVLSI 2017
Country/TerritoryGermany
CityBochum, North Rhine-Westfalia
Period7/3/177/5/17

Keywords

  • Configurable memory
  • adaptable hardware
  • cache memories
  • hardware security
  • low-power design
  • low-power embedded systems
  • side-channel attacks

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Control and Systems Engineering
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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