CONDENSE: A Moving Target Defense Approach for Mitigating Cache Side-Channel Attacks

Common consumer electronic devices (including smartphones, smart TVs, personal computers, etc.) feature increasingly complex processors for the required computations. These processors typically feature caches, which substantially improve the devices' performance, but may also be prone to side-channel attacks, wherein an attacker measures and analyzes the side-channel data in order to deduce private information. In this article, we explore CONDENSE: Configurability-Driven Security as a viable low-overhead technique for mitigating security vulnerabilities in caches. CONDENSE takes advantage of runtime reconfigurable caches to provide a moving target defense against side-channel attacks, while also optimizing the cache's energy consumption. Experimental results reveal that employing cache configurability as a defense mechanism is promising and warrants further studies.