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Challenges of Using Performance Counters in Security Against Side-Channel Leakage

Authors:
Maria Mushtaq
Pascal Benoit
Umer Farooq

Keywords: Counters; Side-Channel Attacks(SCAs); Cryptography; Detection; Mitigation; Machine Learning;Security; Privacy.

Abstract:
Over the past few years, high resolution and stealthyattacks and their variants such as Flush+Reload, Flush+Flush,Prime+Probe, Spectre and Meltdown have completely exposedthe vulnerabilities in modern computing architectures. Manyeffective mitigation techniques against such attacks are also beingproposed that use system’s behavioral parameters at run-timeusingPerformance Counters(PCs) coupled with machine learningmodels. Although PCs, both in hardware and software, haveshown promising results when used in the context of security,this paper provides experimental evaluation and analysis of thepotential challenges, perils and pitfalls of using these counters insecurity.

Pages: 12 to 17

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2020

Publication date: October 25, 2020

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2519-8599

ISBN: 978-1-61208-818-1

Location: Nice, France

Dates: from October 25, 2020 to October 29, 2020