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International Workshop on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection

RAID 2014: Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses pp 299–319Cite as

Wait a Minute! A fast, Cross-VM Attack on AES

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Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNSC,volume 8688)

Abstract

In cloud computing, efficiencies are reaped by resource sharing such as co-location of computation and deduplication of data. This work exploits resource sharing in virtualization software to build a powerful cache-based attack on AES. We demonstrate the vulnerability by mounting Cross-VM Flush+Reload cache attacks in VMware VMs to recover the keys of an AES implementation of OpenSSL 1.0.1 running inside the victim VM. Furthermore, the attack works in a realistic setting where different VMs are located on separate cores. The modified flush+reload attack we present, takes only in the order of seconds to minutes to succeed in a cross-VM setting. Therefore long term co-location, as required by other fine grain attacks in the literature, are not needed. The results of this study show that there is a great security risk to OpenSSL AES implementation running on VMware cloud services when the deduplication is not disabled.

Keywords

  • Cross-VM
  • memory deduplication
  • flush+reload
  • cache attacks

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  • DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-11379-1_15
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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA, USA

    Gorka Irazoqui, Mehmet Sinan Inci, Thomas Eisenbarth & Berk Sunar

Authors
  1. Gorka Irazoqui
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  2. Mehmet Sinan Inci
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  3. Thomas Eisenbarth
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  4. Berk Sunar
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    Angelos Stavrou

  2. VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Herbert Bos

  3. Stevens Institute of Technology, NJ, USA

    Georgios Portokalidis

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Irazoqui, G., Inci, M.S., Eisenbarth, T., Sunar, B. (2014). Wait a Minute! A fast, Cross-VM Attack on AES. In: Stavrou, A., Bos, H., Portokalidis, G. (eds) Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses. RAID 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8688. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11379-1_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11379-1_15

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-11378-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-11379-1

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