Title
Preventing cryptographic key leakage in cloud virtual machines
Abstract
In a typical infrastructure-as-a-service cloud setting, different clients harness the cloud provider's services by executing virtual machines (VM). However, recent studies have shown that the cryptographic keys, the most crucial component in many of our daily used cryptographic protocols (e.g., SSL/TLS), can be extracted using cross-VM side-channel attacks. To defeat such a threat, this paper introduces HERMES, a new system that aims to protect the cryptographic keys in the cloud against any kind of cross-VM side-channel attacks by simply partitioning the cryptographic keys into random shares, and storing each share in a different VM. Moreover, it also periodically re-shares the cryptographic keys, thereby invalidating the potentially extracted partial ones. We have implemented HERMES as a library extension that is transparent to the application software, and performed deep case studies with a web and a mail server on Amazon EC2 cloud. Our experimental results show that the runtime overhead of the proposed system can be as low as 1%.
Year
Venue
Field
2014
USENIX Security
Hash-based message authentication code,Key management,Symmetric-key algorithm,Cryptographic protocol,Key exchange,Computer science,Computer security,Cryptographic primitive,Controlled Cryptographic Item,Operating system,Cloud computing
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
9
0.44
References 
Authors
33
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Erman Pattuk1615.01
Murat Kantarcioglu22470168.03
Zhiqiang Lin3108264.49
Huseyin Ulusoy4635.43