Cache-Based Side-Channel Attack Mitigation for Many-Core Distributed Systems via Dynamic Task Migration

Side-channel attacks (SCA) are a serious threat to cryptographic systems due to mostly unavoidable information leakage. Cache-based SCAs take advantage of cache inherent timing properties on shared memory systems to extract security-critical information. In this paper, we present a novel approach to mitigate cache-based SCAs on distributed many-core systems, based on a resource management technique. Our solution leverages dynamic task migration as a mechanism to ensure a secure execution scenario for security-critical applications. Additionally, we propose a resource-management-based mechanism to ensure a secure execution when migration is not possible due to a lack of available resources. We evaluate our solution in terms of gained security and performance impact using the Sniper simulator for different configurations. Results show that our technique effectively develops resilience against SCAs, while causing a low performance slowdown (1.6% on average, 9% worst case). For all tested benchmarks, our worst-case performance slowdown is 20% less than a state-of-the-art countermeasure. Moreover, our solution utilizes less than 1 ms of system run-time overhead for a 64 core platform with 100% utilization.