SwiftDir: Secure Cache Coherence without Overprotection

Cache coherence states have recently been exploited to leak secrets through timing-channel attacks. The root cause lies in the fact that shared data in state Exclusive (E) and state Shared (S) are served from different cache layers. The state-of-the-art countermeasure-S-MESI-serves both E-and S-state shared data from the last-level cache (LLC) by explicitly synchronizing the Modified (M) state across private caches and the LLC. This has to sacrifice the silent upgrade feature that MESI introduces for speedup. Moreover, it enforces protection to not only exploitable shared data but also unshared data. This further slows down performance, especially for write-after-read intensive applications.

In this paper, we propose SwiftDir to efficiently secure cache coherence against cover-channel attacks without overprotection. SwiftDir fundamentally narrows down the protection scope to write-protected data. Such exploitable shared data can be uniquely identified with the write-protection permission in the memory management unit (MMU) and do not necessarily transit to state M. We validate this idea through tracing system calls of shared libraries on Linux. We then investigate all three commercial cache architectures (i.e., PIPT, VIPT, and VIVT) and find it feasible to hitchhike the address translation process to transmit the write-protection information from the MMU to the coherence controller. Then SwiftDir enforces protection over only write-protected data by serving all requests toward them directly from the LLC with a constant latency. This not only simplifies how MESI handles write-protected data but also avoids how S-MESI overprotects them. Meanwhile, SwiftDir still preserves silent upgrade for efficient handling of unshared data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our SwiftDir can secure cache coherence while outperforming not only secure S-MESI but also unprotected MESI.