Red Alert for Power Leakage: Exploiting Intel RAPL-Induced Side Channels

Zhenkai Zhang, Sisheng Liang, Fan Yao, Xing Gao

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

9 Scopus citations

Abstract

RAPL (Running Average Power Limit) is a hardware feature introduced by Intel to facilitate power management. Even though RAPL and its supporting software interfaces can benefit power management significantly, they are unfortunately designed without taking certain security issues into careful consideration. In this paper, we demonstrate that information leaked through RAPL-induced side channels can be exploited to mount realistic attacks. Specifically, we have constructed a new RAPL-based covert channel using a single AVX instruction, which can exfiltrate data across different boundaries (e.g., those established by containers in software or even CPUs in hardware); and, we have investigated the first RAPL-based website fingerprinting technique that can identify visited webpages with a high accuracy (up to 99% in the case of the regular network using a browser like Chrome or Safari, and up to 81% in the case of the anonymity network using Tor). These two studies form a preliminary examination into RAPL-imposed security implications. In addition, we discuss some possible countermeasures.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationASIA CCS 2021 - Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages162-175
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9781450382878
DOIs
StatePublished - May 24 2021
Event16th ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security, ASIA CCS 2021 - Virtual, Online, Hong Kong
Duration: Jun 7 2021Jun 11 2021

Publication series

NameASIA CCS 2021 - Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security

Conference

Conference16th ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security, ASIA CCS 2021
Country/TerritoryHong Kong
CityVirtual, Online
Period06/7/2106/11/21

Keywords

  • RAPL
  • covert channel
  • side-channel attack
  • website fingerprinting

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