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A Survey of Side-Channel Attacks on Caches and Countermeasures

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Abstract

With the increasing proliferation of Internet-of-Things (IoT) in our daily lives, security and trustworthiness are key considerations in designing computing devices. A vast majority of IoT devices use shared caches for improved performance. Unfortunately, the data sharing introduces the vulnerability in these systems. Side-channel attacks in shared caches have been explored for over a decade. Existing approaches utilize side-channel (non-functional) behaviors such as time, power, and electromagnetic radiation to attack encryption schemes. In this paper, we survey the widely used target encryption algorithms, the common attack techniques, and recent attacks that exploit the features of cache. In particular, we focus on the cache timing attacks against the cloud computing and embedded systems. We also survey existing countermeasures at different abstraction levels.

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  1. University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, 32611, USA

    Yangdi Lyu & Prabhat Mishra

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Lyu, Y., Mishra, P. A Survey of Side-Channel Attacks on Caches and Countermeasures. J Hardw Syst Secur 2, 33–50 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41635-017-0025-y

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