CaSA: End-to-end Quantitative Security Analysis of Randomly Mapped Caches

Micro-architectural vulnerabilities enable an attacker to use micro-architecture structures, such as caches, to exfiltrate secrets from a victim. Obfuscating mitigation schemes, such as randomly mapped caches, have recently gained in popularity for their appealing performance characteristics. An important, yet under-explored research challenge is the quantitative study of the security effectiveness of these schemes. In this paper, we design a security analysis framework, CaSA, to comprehensively and quantitatively analyze the security of these randomly mapped caches. We consider the end-to-end communication steps involved in side-channel attacks and study the statistical relationship between different steps. In addition, we leverage the concepts from the field of telecommunications to formulate the security analysis into a statistical problem.We use CaSA to evaluate various cache attack strategies and mitigation configurations. We discovered intrinsic security problems in the state-of-the-art randomly mapped caches.