Deconstructing New Cache Designs For Thwarting Software Cachebased Side Channel Attacks

Software cache-based side channel attacks present a serious threat to computer systems. Previously proposed counter-measures were either too costly for practical use or only effective against particular attacks. Thus, a recent work identified cache interferences in general as the root cause and proposed two new cache designs, namely partition-locked cache (PLcache) and random permutation cache (RP-cache), to defeat cache-based side channel attacks by eliminating/obfuscating cache interferences. In this paper, we analyze these new cache designs and identify significant vul-nerabilities and shortcomings of those new cache designs. We also propose possible solutions and improvements over the original new cache designs to overcome the identified shortcomings. Copyright 2008 ACM