Systems Architecture Commons^™

Stopwatch: A Cloud Architecture For Timing Channel Mitigation, Peng Li, Debin Gao, Michael K Reiter

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This article presents StopWatch, a system that defends against timing-based side-channel attacks that arise from coresidency of victims and attackers in infrastructure-as-a-service clouds. StopWatch triplicates each cloud-resident guest virtual machine (VM) and places replicas so that the three replicas of a guest VM are coresident with nonoverlapping sets of (replicas of) other VMs. StopWatch uses the timing of I/O events at a VM’s replicas collectively to determine the timings observed by each one or by an external observer, so that observable timing behaviors are similarly likely in the absence of any other individual, coresident VMs. We detail the design and …