From Colocation to Exfiltration: Practical Cache Side-Channel Attacks in the Modern Public Cloud

Zirui Neil Zhao*, Adam Morrison, Christopher W. Fletcher, Josep Torrellas

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Sharing resources among tenants is fundamental to public clouds, enhancing efficiency but also creating opportunities for microarchitectural side-channel attacks. However, cloud vendors remain skeptical about the practicality of these attacks, particularly regarding the ability to colocate attacker and victim, and to overcome system noise. In this work, we develop a series of techniques for each step of the attack and, for the first time, demonstrate cross-tenant information leakage on the public Google Cloud Run, refuting the belief that such attacks are impractical. Our findings highlight the need to secure public clouds against side-channel attacks.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)95-102
Number of pages8
JournalIEEE Micro
Volume45
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - 2025

Funding

FundersFunder number
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
Semiconductor Research Corporation
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
National Science Foundation1954521, 1956007, 1942888

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