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Robust Covert Channels Based on DRAM Power Consumption

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Information Security (ISC 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 11723))

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Abstract

To improve the energy efficiency of computing systems, modern CPUs provide registers that give estimates on the power consumption. However, the ability to read the power consumption introduces one class of security concerns called covert channels, which are communication channels that enable one process to transmit a message to another one in a system where these processes were meant to be isolated. Our contribution consists in the first covert channel in which messages are transmitted by modulating the DRAM power consumption. The channel implementation outperforms similar proposals, achieving 1800 bps with 10% error, and 2400 bps with 15% error, when running on a notebook and on a desktop platforms, respectively, To test its robustness against application interference, we considered the channel’s performance when running concurrently with different benchmarks: MRBench, Terasort and LINPACK. When running on the notebook, the channel is fairly robust, achieving between 300 and 600 bps with around 10% error depending on the workload considered.

T. B. Paiva is supported by CAPES. R. Terada is supported by CNPq grant number 442014/2014-7.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Notice that this works because the binary messages are random, thus we expected them to have a similar number of 0’s and 1’s.

  2. 2.

    That is, the binary case.

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Acknowledgments

This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES) - Finance Code 001. This research is part of the INCT of the Future Internet for Smart Cities funded by CNPq proc. 465446/2014-0, Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior –Brasil (CAPES) – Finance Code 001, FAPESP proc. 14/50937-1, and FAPESP proc. 15/24485-9. Dr. Navaridas is supported by EuroEXA, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme under Grant Agreement 754337. Part of this paper was written while T. B. Paiva was attending the Escuela de Ciencias Informáticas 2018 supported by a travel grant given by the Computer Science Department of Universidad de Buenos Aires.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil

    Thales Bandiera Paiva & Routo Terada

  2. School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Javier Navaridas

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  1. Thales Bandiera Paiva
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  2. Javier Navaridas
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  3. Routo Terada
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Correspondence to Thales Bandiera Paiva .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    Zhiqiang Lin

  2. University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Charalampos Papamanthou

  3. Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA

    Michalis Polychronakis

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Paiva, T.B., Navaridas, J., Terada, R. (2019). Robust Covert Channels Based on DRAM Power Consumption. In: Lin, Z., Papamanthou, C., Polychronakis, M. (eds) Information Security. ISC 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11723. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30215-3_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30215-3_16

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-30215-3

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