Fine Grain Cross-VM Attacks on Xen and VMware

Author

Irazoqui, Gorka ; Inci, Mehmet Sinan ; Eisenbarth, Thomas ; Sunar, Berk

fYear

2014

fDate

3-5 Dec. 2014

Firstpage

737

Lastpage

744

Abstract

This work exposes vulnerabilities in virtualized cloud servers by mounting Cross-VM cache attacks in Xen and VMware VMs. We show for the first time that AES implementations in a number popular cryptographic libraries including Open SSL, Polar SSL and Libgcrypt have non-constant execution times and are vulnerable to Bernstein´s correlation attack when run in Xen and VMware (bare metal version) VMs. We show that the vulnerability persists even if the VMs are running on different cores in the same machine. Experiments on Amazon EC2 and Google Compute Engine highlight the practical implications of the found vulnerability. The results of this study show that there remains a security risk to AES implementations of popular libraries and data encrypted under AES on popular cloud services.

Keywords

cache storage; cloud computing; cryptography; risk management; virtual machines; virtualisation; AES implementations; Amazon EC2; Bernstein correlation attack; Google Compute Engine; Libgcrypt; Open SSL; Polar SSL; VMware VM; Xen VM; cloud services; cryptographic libraries; fine grain cross-VM cache attacks; nonconstant execution times; security risk; virtual machines; virtualized cloud servers; vulnerabilities; Abstracts; Big data; Cloud computing; Conferences; Government; Prefetching; Servers; AES key recovery attack; Cross-VM attacks; Cryptographic Libraries; cache timing attacks; virtualization;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Big Data and Cloud Computing (BdCloud), 2014 IEEE Fourth International Conference on

Conference_Location

Sydney, NSW

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/BDCloud.2014.102

Filename

7034868