Work

Cross-Tenant Side-Channel Attacks in PaaS Clouds

Year: 2014

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: We present a new attack framework for conducting cache-based side-channel attacks and demonstrate this framework in attacks between tenants on commercial Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) clouds. Our framework uses the FLUSH-RELOAD attack of Gullasch et al. as a primitive, and extends this work by leveraging it within an automaton-driven strategy for tracing a victim's execution. We leverage our framework first to confirm co-location of tenants and then to extract secrets across tenant boundaries. We specifically demonstrate attacks to collect potentially sensitive application data (e.g., the number of items in a shopping cart), to hijack user accounts, and to break SAML single sign-on. To the best of our knowledge, our attacks are the first granular, cross-tenant, side-channel attacks successfully demonstrated on state-of-the-art commercial clouds, PaaS or otherwise.

Source: ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS)

DOI: 10.1145/2660267.2660356

Authors: Yinqian Zhang, Ari Juels, Michael K. Reiter, Thomas Ristenpart

Institutions: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Jacobs Institute, Cornell Tech, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Language: English

Topic: Security and Verification in Computing

Subfield: Hardware and Architecture

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: bronze

Funders: National Science Foundation, Google

Awards: TWC: Frontier: Collaborative: Rethinking Security in the Era of Cloud Computing, TWC: Frontier: Collaborative: Rethinking Security in the Era of Cloud Computing, CAREER: Infrastructure for Secure Cloud Computing, TC: Medium: Collaborative Research: Random Number Generation and Use in Virtualized Environments