Empirical Evaluation of the Hypervisor Scheduling on Side Channel Attacks

Along with the wide adoption of the cloud platform, various attacks also target clouds. Due to the sharing of the underlying physical resources among different virtual machines (VMs), various side-channel attacks have been demonstrated to be capable of stealing victim's secret information, such as encryption key, by monitoring the victim's access pattern to a shared hardware, such as CPU cache. Among various defense mechanisms proposed, the hypervisor scheduling based schemes shed some light on lightweight solutions that are more likely to be adopted in practice. However, scheduling is affected by several factors that have not been thoroughly investigated so far. In this study, we aim to study in-depth the impact of various factors affecting the hypervisor scheduling, with the objective to understand their impact on mitigating these side-channel attacks. Our results can not only deepen our understanding, but also provide some guidelines to design effective scheduling based defenses in the future.