A Shared Cache Attack That Works Across Cores and Defies VM Sandboxing and Its Application to AES

Explore a groundbreaking 18-minute conference talk presented at the 2015 IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy that unveils a novel shared cache attack capable of breaching VM sandboxing and operating across processor cores. Delve into the intricacies of the S$A attack, which exploits access time variations in the last level cache and utilizes huge pages to circumvent VM boundaries without requiring deduplication. Discover how this fine-grain cross-core cache attack poses a significant threat to cloud computing infrastructure, even with disabled features like deduplication. Learn about its application to AES encryption and its ability to recover keys in cross-VM settings on Xen 4.1. Gain insights into the attack's methodology, its comparison to previous cache attacks, and its implications for existing cloud servers and virtualization security.