SEA Cache: A Performance-Efficient Countermeasure for Contention-based Attacks

TL;DR

The SEA cache enhances cache security against contention-based side-channel attacks by allowing user-specific logical associativity, balancing security and performance with minimal overhead.

Contribution

It introduces a novel cache configuration enabling user-specific logical associativity, improving security without significantly degrading performance.

Findings

SEA cache reduces attack surface against contention-based attacks.

It achieves near-zero performance penalty for normal users.

Power and area overheads are manageable at 20% and 3.4%.

Abstract

Many cache designs have been proposed to guard against contention-based side-channel attacks. One well-known type of cache is the randomized remapping cache. Many randomized remapping caches provide fixed or over protection, which leads to permanent performance degradation, or they provide flexible protection, but sacrifice performance against strong contention-based attacks. To improve the secure cache design, we extend an existing secure cache design, CEASER-SH cache, and propose the SEA cache. The novel cache configurations in both caches are logical associativity, which allows the cache line to be placed not only in its mapped cache set but also in the subsequent cache sets. SEA cache allows each user or each process to have a different local logical associativity. Hence, only those users or processes that request extra protection against contention-based attacks are protected with high logical associativity. Other users or processes can access the cache with lower latency and higher performance. Compared to a CEASER-SH cache with logical associativity of 8, an SEA cache with logical associativity of 1 for normal protection users and 16 for high protection users has a Cycles Per Instruction penalty that is about 0.6% less for users under normal protections and provides better security against contention-based attacks. Based on a 45nm technology library, and compared to a conventional cache, we estimate the power overhead is about 20% and the area overhead is 3.4%.