ROOTS: Out-Of-Order Execution As A Cross-VM Side Channel And Other Applications – Sophia d’Antoine
Given the rise in popularity of cloud computing and platform-as-a-service, vulnerabilities, inherent to systems which share hardware resources, will become increasingly attractive targets to malicious software authors. In this talk, Sophia will introduce a novel side channel across virtual machines through the detection of out-of-order execution. She and her colleagues created a simple duplex channel as well as a broadcast channel. She’ll discuss possible adversaries for this channel and proposes further work to make this channel more secure, efficient and applicable in realistic scenarios. In addition, she considers seven possible malicious applications of this channel: theft of encryption keys, program identification, environmental keying, malicious triggers, denial of service attacks, determining VM co-location, malicious data injection, and side channels. We asked Sophia a few questions about her talk. Please tell us the top 5 facts