Are Coherence Protocol States Vulnerable to Information Leakage?

Most commercial multi-core processors incorporate hardware coherence protocols to support efficient data transfers and updates between their constituent cores. While hardware coherence protocols provide immense benefits for application performance by removing the burden of software-based coherence, we note that understanding the security vulnerabilities posed by such oft-used, widely-adopted processor features is critical for secure processor designs in the future. In this paper, we demonstrate a new vulnerability exposed by cache coherence protocol states. We present novel insights into how adversaries could cleverly manipulate the coherence states on shared cache blocks, and construct covert timing channels to illegitimately communicate secrets to the spy. We demonstrate 6 different practical scenarios for covert timing channel construction. In contrast to prior works, we assume a broader adversary model where the trojan and spy can either exploit explicitly shared read-only physical pages (e.g., shared library code), or use memory deduplication feature to implicitly force create shared physical pages. We demonstrate how adversaries can manipulate combinations of coherence states and data placement in different caches to construct timing channels. We also explore how adversaries could exploit multiple caches and their associated coherence states to improve transmission bandwidth with symbols encoding multiple bits. Our experimental results on commercial systems show that the peak transmission bandwidths of these covert timing channels can vary between 700 to 1100 Kbits/sec. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to highlight the vulnerability of hardware cache coherence protocols to timing channels that can help computer architects to craft effective defenses against exploits on such critical processor features.

I. Introduction

Cyber attacks, that exploit malicious insiders and exfiltrate secret information, are a growing concern for computer users. Covert channels are one such class of insider threats, where a trojan process, that has access to sensitive user-related information (e.g., user's personal data), secretly exfiltrates the data to a spy process even when the underlying system security policy explicitly prohibits any such communication [1]. Also, note that the trojan cannot directly reveal secrets to the outside world (since system security auditors can be easily catch such activity), and has to rely on covert modes of operation to exfiltrate secrets to the spy. In contrast to side channels where a victim process unwittingly exposes sensitive application profile to the spy monitoring its activity, covert channels work by intentional collusion between two malicious processes, namely the trojan and spy.