Abstract : Memory deduplication opens a side-channel that enables attackers to detect if there is a second copy of a memory page on a host their Virtual Machine (VM) is running on, and thus to gain information about co-resident VMs. In former work, we presented a practical side-channel attack that can even detect which specific versions of applications are being executed in co-resident VMs. In this paper, we enhance this attack by testing for representative groups of pages for certain groups of application versions, so-called page signatures, instead of testing for a single application version only. As a result, our new attack is significantly more efficient. Our results indicate that the attack duration can be reduced from several hours to minutes at the cost of a small loss in precision only.
https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02023744
Contributor : Hal Ifip <>
Submitted on : Thursday, February 21, 2019 - 4:57:02 PM Last modification on : Friday, November 20, 2020 - 4:26:02 PM Long-term archiving on: : Wednesday, May 22, 2019 - 4:30:39 PM
Jens Lindemann, Mathias Fischer. Efficient Identification of Applications in Co-resident VMs via a Memory Side-Channel. 33th IFIP International Conference on ICT Systems Security and Privacy Protection (SEC), Sep 2018, Poznan, Poland. pp.245-259, ⟨10.1007/978-3-319-99828-2_18⟩. ⟨hal-02023744⟩