Plugging Side-Channel Leaks with Timing Information Flow Control
This addresses a critical security problem for cloud providers and users by mitigating timing side-channels, though it appears incremental as an adaptation of existing IFC techniques.
The paper tackles the security challenge of timing side-channels in cloud computing by proposing Timing Information Flow Control (TIFC), a novel adaptation that uses labels and system tools like deterministic execution and pacing queues to control information leakage, resulting in 'timing-hardened' infrastructure that permits statistical multiplexing while rate-limiting timing leaks.
The cloud model's dependence on massive parallelism and resource sharing exacerbates the security challenge of timing side-channels. Timing Information Flow Control (TIFC) is a novel adaptation of IFC techniques that may offer a way to reason about, and ultimately control, the flow of sensitive information through systems via timing channels. With TIFC, objects such as files, messages, and processes carry not just content labels describing the ownership of the object's "bits," but also timing labels describing information contained in timing events affecting the object, such as process creation/termination or message reception. With two system design tools-deterministic execution and pacing queues-TIFC enables the construction of "timing-hardened" cloud infrastructure that permits statistical multiplexing, while aggregating and rate-limiting timing information leakage between hosted computations.