PiPoMonitor: Mitigating Cross-core Cache Attacks Using the Auto-Cuckoo Filter
Fengkai Yuan1,a, Kai Wang2, Rui Hou1,b, Xiaoxin Li1,c, Peinan Li1,d, Lutan Zhao1,e, Jiameng Ying1,f, Amro Awad3 and Dan Meng1
1State Key Laboratory of Information Security, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
ayuanfengkai@iie.ac.cn
bhourui@iie.ac.cn
clixiaoxin@iie.ac.cn
dlipeinan@iie.ac.cn
ezhaolutan@iie.ac.cn
fyingjiameng@iie.ac.cn
2Department of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China
wk1220ym@163.com
3Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA
ajawad@ncsu.edu
ABSTRACT
Cache side channel attacks obtain victim cache line access footprint to infer security-critical information. Among them, cross-core attacks exploiting the shared last level cache are more threatening as their simplicity to set up and high capacity. Stateful approaches of detection-based mitigation observe precise cache behaviors and protect specific cache lines that are suspected of being attacked. However, their recording structures incur large storage overhead and are vulnerable to reverse engineering attacks. Exploring the intrinsic non-determinate layout of a traditional Cuckoo filter, this paper proposes a space efficient Auto-Cuckoo filter to record access footprints, which succeed to decrease storage overhead and resist reverse engineering attacks at the same time. With Auto-Cuckoo filter, we propose PiPoMonitor to detect Ping-Pong patterns and prefetch specific cache line to interfere with adversaries’ cache probes. Security analysis shows the PiPoMonitor can effectively mitigate cross-core attacks and the Auto-Cuckoo filter is immune to reverse engineering attacks. Evaluation results indicate PiPoMonitor has negligible impact on performance and the storage overhead is only 0.37%, an order of magnitude lower than previous stateful approaches.
Keywords: Cache Side Channels, Cuckoo Filters, Detectionbased Mitigation.
