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Trilochan: a solution to detect cross-VM direct timing attack

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Abstract

Traditionally, a single machine hosts multiple services for the effective utilization of available resources. Such resource sharing among the co-hosted services opens the scope of Side Channel Attack (SCA) from one process to another. One such attack is the Branch Prediction Analysis (BPA) attack to extract the decryption key of a secured communication going on a shared resource. Virtual Machines (VMs) have become a defacto standard for hosting such multiple services on a single machine. VM provides a dedicated operating system and environment for each service. With reference to different types of BPA attack in a virtualization environment, this paper proposes a behavioral monitoring based novel approach, Trilochan, to detect Cross-VM Direct Timing Attack (DTA), a type of BPA attack. The solution is found very useful with negligible performance overheads.

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This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Gujarat Technological University, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, 382424, India

    Dhara H. Buch

  2. Computer Engineering Department, L. D. College of Engineering, Ahmedabad, India

    Dhara H. Buch

  3. Information and Cyber Security Board, Space Application Centre, ISRO, Ahmedabad, India

    Haresh S. Bhatt

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  1. Dhara H. Buch
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  2. Haresh S. Bhatt
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Correspondence to Dhara H. Buch.

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Buch, D.H., Bhatt, H.S. Trilochan: a solution to detect cross-VM direct timing attack. J Ambient Intell Human Comput 14, 8745–8763 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-021-03628-5

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