Modern Clouds: Side-Channel Attacks and Defenses
Host
Mengjia Yan
MIT
Abstract:
Cloud computing, which has seen significant growth over the past decade, fundamentally relies on the sharing of hardware resources among users. This approach enhances resource utilization and reduces operational costs. However, it also enables unintended information leakage through microarchitectural side channels. Despite the threat of side-channel attacks, cloud vendors remain skeptical about the practicality of these attacks in production cloud environments, leading to inadequate side-channel mitigations.
My research focuses on exploring side-channel attacks in realistic cloud settings and developing comprehensive defenses across the computing stack. In this talk, I will first introduce a series of novel attack techniques that address practical challenges in conducting side-channel attacks in public clouds. Using these techniques, I demonstrated an end-to-end, cross-tenant side-channel attack on Google Cloud. This demonstration was subsequently recognized by Google as a critical-level bug, prompting a review by their product team. In the second part of this talk, I will introduce Untangle, a novel framework for side-channel defense. Untangle is designed to quantify and reduce information leakage in defense schemes based on dynamic resource-partitioning. Untangle opens up a defense paradigm that allows a controlled amount of information leakage in exchange for improved performance. To conclude, I will outline future research directions aimed at developing secure and efficient cloud systems resistant to side-channel attacks.
Bio:
Neil Zhao is currently a post-doc researcher at NVIDIA Research. Starting in the Fall of 2025, he will be an Assistant Professor in the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. Neil received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2024, where he was advised by Prof. Josep Torrellas. His research interests include Computer Architecture, Hardware/System Security, and Cloud Computing. For more information about his work and achievements, please visit https://neilzhao.me.
Cloud computing, which has seen significant growth over the past decade, fundamentally relies on the sharing of hardware resources among users. This approach enhances resource utilization and reduces operational costs. However, it also enables unintended information leakage through microarchitectural side channels. Despite the threat of side-channel attacks, cloud vendors remain skeptical about the practicality of these attacks in production cloud environments, leading to inadequate side-channel mitigations.
My research focuses on exploring side-channel attacks in realistic cloud settings and developing comprehensive defenses across the computing stack. In this talk, I will first introduce a series of novel attack techniques that address practical challenges in conducting side-channel attacks in public clouds. Using these techniques, I demonstrated an end-to-end, cross-tenant side-channel attack on Google Cloud. This demonstration was subsequently recognized by Google as a critical-level bug, prompting a review by their product team. In the second part of this talk, I will introduce Untangle, a novel framework for side-channel defense. Untangle is designed to quantify and reduce information leakage in defense schemes based on dynamic resource-partitioning. Untangle opens up a defense paradigm that allows a controlled amount of information leakage in exchange for improved performance. To conclude, I will outline future research directions aimed at developing secure and efficient cloud systems resistant to side-channel attacks.
Bio:
Neil Zhao is currently a post-doc researcher at NVIDIA Research. Starting in the Fall of 2025, he will be an Assistant Professor in the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. Neil received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2024, where he was advised by Prof. Josep Torrellas. His research interests include Computer Architecture, Hardware/System Security, and Cloud Computing. For more information about his work and achievements, please visit https://neilzhao.me.