Last-Level Cache Side-Channel Attacks Are Feasible in the Modern Public Cloud

Last-level cache side-channel attacks have been mostly demonstrated in highly-controlled, quiescent local environments. Hence, it is unclear whether such attacks are feasible in a production cloud environment. In the cloud, side channels are flooded with noise from activities of other tenants and, in Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) workloads, the attacker has a very limited time window to mount the attack.

In this paper, we show that such attacks are feasible in practice, although they require new techniques. We present an end-to-end, cross-tenant attack on a vulnerable ECDSA implementation in the public FaaS Google Cloud Run environment. We introduce several new techniques to improve every step of the attack. First, to speed-up the generation of eviction sets, we introduce L2-driven candidate address filtering and a Binary Search-based algorithm for address pruning. Second, to monitor victim memory accesses with high time resolution, we introduce Parallel Probing. Finally, we leverage power spectral density from signal processing to easily identify the victim's target cache set in the frequency domain. Overall, using these mechanisms, we extract a median value of 81% of the secret ECDSA nonce bits from a victim container in 19 seconds on average.

• Computer systems organization → Cloud computing; • Security and privacy → Hardware attacks and countermeasures.