Cross-VM branch prediction analysis attack: Scope assessment and simulation

Abstract

Growing scope of cloud computing has made cloud security a challenging parameter. Among all the security parameters, virtualization security requires primary focus as it hides internal resource sharing details of the system. Side Channel Attack (SCA) is an attack that exploits the shared resource for extracting the private key of a cryptographic algorithm. Considering the significance of virtualization security, we need to analyze the SCA in a virtualization environment. In this paper, we target the Branch Prediction Analysis (BPA) Attack, one type of SCA. We have carried out an analysis to verify the scope of various BPA attack launching methods in virtualization environment along with the simulation. We have also analyzed the scope of existing solutions handling BPA attack.