Towards Provable Timing-Channel Prevention

We describe our ongoing research that aims to eliminate microarchitectural timing channels through time protection, which eliminates the root cause of these channels, competition for capacity-limited hardware resources. A proof-ofconcept implementation of time protection demonstrated the approach ca...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Operating systems review 2020-08, Vol.54 (1), p.1-7
Main Authors: Heiser, Gernot, Murray, Toby, Klein, Gerwin
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:We describe our ongoing research that aims to eliminate microarchitectural timing channels through time protection, which eliminates the root cause of these channels, competition for capacity-limited hardware resources. A proof-ofconcept implementation of time protection demonstrated the approach can be effective a nd l ow o verhead, b ut also that present hardware fails to support the approach in some aspects and that we need an improved hardXare-software contract to achieve real security. We have demonstrated that these mechanisms are not hard to provide, and are working on their inclusion in the RISC-V ISA. Assuming compliant hardware, we outline how we think we can then formally prove that timing channels are eliminated.
ISSN:0163-5980
DOI:10.1145/3421473.3421475