Everywhere All at Once: Co-Location Attacks on Public Cloud FaaS

Microarchitectural side-channel attacks exploit shared hardware resources, posing significant threats to modern systems. A pivotal step in these attacks is achieving physical host colocation between attacker and victim. This step is especially challenging in public cloud environments due to the widespread adoption of the virtual private cloud (VPC) and the ever-growing size of the data centers. Furthermore, the shift towards Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) environments, characterized by dynamic function instance placements and limited control for attackers, compounds this challenge.

In this paper, we present the first comprehensive study on risks of and techniques for co-location attacks in public cloud FaaS environments. We develop two physical host fingerprinting techniques and propose a new, inexpensive methodology for large-scale instance co-location verification. Using these techniques, we analyze how Google Cloud Run places function instances on physical hosts and identify exploitable placement behaviors. Leveraging our findings, we devise an effective strategy for instance launching that achieves 100% probability of co-locating the attacker with at least one victim instance. Moreover, the attacker co-locates with 61%-100% of victim instances in three major Cloud Run data centers.

• Computer systems organization → Cloud computing; • Security and privacy → Side-channel analysis and countermeasures.