Thermal Covert Channels on Multi-core Platforms
This reveals a security limitation for multi-core systems, showing that even dedicated resource partitioning is vulnerable to thermal-based attacks.
The paper tackled the problem of side channels in multi-core platforms by demonstrating that thermal side channels can circumvent strong isolation techniques, achieving up to 12.5 bps in covert communication and detecting processes on neighboring cores.
Side channels remain a challenge to information flow control and security in modern computing platforms. Resource partitioning techniques that minimise the number of shared resources among processes are often used to address this challenge. In this work, we focus on multi-core platforms and we demonstrate that even seemingly strong isolation techniques based on dedicated cores and memory can be circumvented through the use of thermal side channels. Specifically, we show that the processor core temperature can be used both as a side channel as well as a covert communication channel even when the system implements strong spatial and temporal partitioning. Our experiments on an x86-based platform demonstrate covert thermal channels that achieve up to 12.5 bps and a weak side channel that can detect processes executed on neighbouring cores. This work therefore shows a limitation in the isolation that can be achieved on existing multi-core systems.