Whispers in the Hyper-Space: High-Bandwidth and Reliable Covert Channel Attacks Inside the Cloud

• Published in: IEEE/ACM transactions on networking Vol. 23; no. 2; pp. 603 - 615
• Main Authors: Wu, Zhenyu, Xu, Zhang, Wang, Haining
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.04.2015
• Subjects: Bandwidth; Cloud; covert channel; Data communication; network security; Processor scheduling; Receivers; Security; Uncertainty; Virtualization
• ISSN: 1063-6692; 1558-2566
• DOI: 10.1109/TNET.2014.2304439

Privacy and information security in general are major concerns that impede enterprise adaptation of shared or public cloud computing. Specifically, the concern of virtual machine (VM) physical co-residency stems from the threat that hostile tenants can leverage various forms of side channels (such as cache covert channels) to exfiltrate sensitive information of victims on the same physical system. However, on virtualized x86 systems, covert channel attacks have not yet proven to be practical, and thus the threat is widely considered a "potential risk." In this paper, we present a novel covert channel attack that is capable of high-bandwidth and reliable data transmission in the cloud. We first study the application of existing cache channel techniques in a virtualized environment and uncover their major insufficiency and difficulties. We then overcome these obstacles by: (1) redesigning a pure timing-based data transmission scheme, and (2) exploiting the memory bus as a high-bandwidth covert channel medium. We further design and implement a robust communication protocol and demonstrate realistic covert channel attacks on various virtualized x86 systems. Our experimental results show that covert channels do pose serious threats to information security in the cloud. Finally, we discuss our insights on covert channel mitigation in virtualized environments.