Hardware/Software Obfuscation against Timing Side-channel Attack on a GPU
Elmira Karimi, Yunsi Fei, David Kaeli

TL;DR
This paper proposes hardware and software countermeasures to obfuscate GPU memory timing side channels, significantly increasing attack difficulty while maintaining or improving performance in encryption tasks.
Contribution
It introduces novel hardware and software techniques to randomize GPU coalescing behavior, enhancing security against timing attacks without sacrificing performance.
Findings
Attack effort increased up to 1433X and 178X
Encryption/decryption performance improved up to 7%
Effective mitigation of GPU timing side-channel vulnerabilities
Abstract
GPUs are increasingly being used in security applications, especially for accelerating encryption/decryption. While GPUs are an attractive platform in terms of performance, the security of these devices raises a number of concerns. One vulnerability is the data-dependent timing information, which can be exploited by adversary to recover the encryption key. Memory system features are frequently exploited since they create detectable timing variations. In this paper, our attack model is a coalescing attack, which leverages a critical GPU microarchitectural feature -- the coalescing unit. As multiple concurrent GPU memory requests can refer to the same cache block, the coalescing unit collapses them into a single memory transaction. The access time of an encryption kernel is dependent on the number of transactions. Correlation between a guessed key value and the associated timing samples…
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