Title
Øzone: Efficient execution with zero timing leakage for modern microarchitectures
Abstract
Summary form only given: Time variation during program execution can leak sensitive information. Time variations due to program control flow and hardware resource contention have been used to steal encryption keys in cipher implementations such as AES and RSA. A number of approaches to mitigate timing-based side-channel attacks have been proposed including cache partitioning, control-flow obfuscation and injecting timing noise into the outputs of code. While these techniques make timing-based side-channel attacks more difficult, they do not eliminate the risks. Prior techniques are either too specific or too expensive, and all leave remnants of the original timing side channel for later attackers to attempt to exploit. In this work, we show that the state-of-the-art techniques in timing side-channel protection, which limit timing leakage but do not eliminate it, still have significant vulnerabilities to timing-based side-channel attacks. To provide a means for total protection from timing-based side-channel attacks, we develop Ozone, the first zero timing leakage execution resource for a modern microarchitecture. Code in Ozone execute under a special hardware thread that gains exclusive access to a single cores resources for a fixed (and limited) number of cycles during which it cannot be interrupted. Memory access under Ozone thread execution is limited to a fixed size uncached scratchpad memory, and all Ozone threads begin execution with a known fixed microarchitectural state. We evaluate Ozone using a number of security sensitive kernels that have previously been targets of timing side-channel attacks, and show that Ozone eliminates timing leakage with minimal performance overhead.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1109/HST.2017.7951817
2017 IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST)
Keywords
DocType
ISBN
fixed microarchitectural state,memory access,special hardware thread,zero timing leakage execution resource,side-channel protection,injecting timing noise,control-flow obfuscation,cache partitioning,timing-based side-channel attacks mitigation,RSA,AES,cipher implementations,encryption keys,hardware resource contention,program control flow,time variations,program execution,Øzone
Conference
978-1-5386-3930-6
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zelalem Birhanu Aweke1322.47
Todd M. Austin200.34