No abstract

We present a kernel-level infrastructure that allows system-wide detection of malicious applications attempting to exploit cache-based side-channel attacks to break the process confinement enforced by standard operating systems. This infrastructure relies on hardware performance counters to collect information at runtime from all applications running on the machine. High-level detection metrics are derived from these measurements to maximize the likelihood of promptly detecting a malicious application. Our experimental assessment shows that we can catch a large family of side-channel attacks with a significantly reduced overhead. We also discuss countermeasures that can be enacted once a process is suspected of carrying out a side-channel attack to increase the overall tradeoff between the system’s security level and the delivered performance under non-suspected process executions.

Nowadays hardware platforms offer a plethora of innovative facities for profiling the execution of programs. Most of them have been exploited as tools for program characterization, thus being used as kind of programexternal observers. In this article we take the opposite perspective where hardware profiling facilities are exploited to execute core functional tasks for the correct and efficient execution of speculative Parallel Discrete Event Simulation (PDES) applications. In more detail we exploit them-specifically, the ones offered by Intel x86-64 processors-to build a hardware-supported incremental checkpointing solution that enables the reduction of the event-execution cost in speculative PDES compared to the software-based counterpart. We integrated our solution in the open source ROOT-Sim runtime environment, thus making it available for exploitation.

No abstract