A Novel Scheduling Framework Leveraging Hardware Cache Partitioning for Cache-Side-Channel Elimination in Clouds

Abstract: While there exist many isolation mechanisms that are available to cloud service providers, including virtual machines, containers, etc., the problem of side-channel increases in importance as a remaining security vulnerability, particularly in the presence of shared caches and multicore processors. In this paper we present a hardware-software mechanism that improves the isolation of cloud processes in the presence of shared caches on multicore chips. Combining the Intel CAT architecture that enables cache partitioning on the fly with novel scheduling techniques and state cleansing mechanisms, we enable cache-side-channel free computing for Linux-based containers and virtual machines, in particular, those managed by KVM. We do a preliminary evaluation of our system using a CPU bound workload. Our system allows Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) to remain enabled and does not require application level changes.