Establishing covert channel on shared cache architecture

Abstract

Cache-based side channel attack has been extensively studied in recent years due to the possibly high damage it would cause. We are interested in replaying one instance of such attack to prove its feasibility and explore its details. Based on the literature review, we implemented a cache-based covert channel on a x86 machine and evaluated its performance by statistical analysis. Under certain limitations, we found that the channel can achieve a bandwidth as high as 1MB/s with over 99% accuracy, which is fairly enough to carry large amount of information.