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Cornell University

SecDCP: Secure Dynamic Cache Partitioning for Efficient Timing Channel Protection

Abstract

In today's multicore processors, the last-level cache is often shared by multiple concurrently running processes to make efficient use of hardware resources. However, previous studies have shown that a shared cache is vulnerable to timing channel attacks that leak con-fidential information from one process to another. Static cache partitioning can eliminate the cache timing channels but incurs significant performance overhead. In this paper, we propose Secure Dynamic Cache Partitioning (SecDCP), a partitioning technique that defeats cache timing channel attacks. The SecDCP scheme changes the size of cache partitions at run time for better performance while preventing insecure information leakage between processes. For cache-sensitive multiprogram workloads, our experimental results show that SecDCP improves performance by up to 43% and by an average of 12.5% over static cache partitioning.

Publication
Proceedings of the 53rd Design Automation Conference (DAC)
Date
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