CacheShield: Protecting Legacy Processes Against Cache Attacks

Understand

Cache attacks pose a threat to any code whose execution flow or memory accesses depend on sensitive information.

• Especially in public clouds, where caches are shared across several tenants, cache attacks remain an unsolved problem.
• Cache attacks rely on evictions by the spy process, which alter the execution behavior of the victim process.
• We show that hardware performance events of cryptographic routines reveal the presence of cache attacks.