Cauldron: a framework to defend against cache-based side-channel attacks in clouds

Cache-based side-channel attacks have garnered much interest in recent literature. Such attacks are particularly relevant for cloud computing platforms due to high levels of multi-tenancy. In fact, there exists recent work that demonstrates such attacks on real cloud platforms (e.g., DotCloud). In this thesis we present Cauldron, a framework to defend against such cache-based side-channel attacks. Cauldron uses a combination of smart scheduling techniques and microarchitectural mechanisms to achieve this goal. We are able to demonstrate improved defenses against both cross-core side channel attacks that target shared caches as well as same-core attacks. Furthermore, Cauldron is transparent to the user - requiring no modi cation (or even recompilation) of users' application binaries by integrating directly with the popular container runtime framework, Docker. Preliminary evaluation results show that the proposed approach is effective for cloud computing applications