[Resource Topic] 2014/435: Wait a minute! A fast, Cross-VM attack on AES

Welcome to the resource topic for 2014/435

Title:
Wait a minute! A fast, Cross-VM attack on AES

Authors: Gorka Irazoqui, Mehmet Sinan Inci, Thomas Eisenbarth, Berk Sunar

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 AES keys 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.

ePrint: https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/435

See all topics related to this paper.

Feel free to post resources that are related to this paper below.

Example resources include: implementations, explanation materials, talks, slides, links to previous discussions on other websites.

For more information, see the rules for Resource Topics .