Detection of Cache-based Side Channel Attack Based on Performance Counters

Abstract

Side channel attack is typically used to get private key of cryptography system. It is one type of great threats to the cryptosystem. How to detect the attack effectively is an open problem. We proposed a way to detect the cache-based side channel attack using performance counters in this paper. Two main performance parameters, i.e. cache miss rate and dTLB miss rate are used here. The result showed that the cache-based side channel attack not only has a high cache miss rate even above 99.4%, but also has a low dTLB miss rate even below 0.002%. The experiments prove that this method can detect cache-based side channel attack accurately and quickly.