Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

On The Effectiveness Of Using Graphics Interrupt As A Side Channel For User Behavior Snooping, Haoyu Ma, Jianwen Tian, Debin Gao, Chunfu Jia

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are now a key component of many devices and systems, including those in the cloud and data centers, thus are also subject to side-channel attacks. Existing side-channel attacks on GPUs typically leak information from graphics libraries like OpenGL and CUDA, which require creating contentions within the GPU resource space and are being mitigated with software patches. This paper evaluates potential side channels exposed at a lower-level interface between GPUs and CPUs, namely the graphics interrupts. These signals could indicate unique signatures of GPU workload, allowing a spy process to infer the behavior of other processes. We …