Method and Electronic Device for mitigating Micro-Architectural side-channel attack by Dynamic Resource Allocation

Technology:; Method & Electronic Device for mitigating Micro-Architectural side-channel attack;

Industry/Application: Computer Technology, Hardware, Software, & Algorithm, Servers, Cloud, Storage, Networking Devices, & etc.;

Market: The global high performance computing market is projected to reach at a CAGR of 7.5% during the period (2024-30).

The problem statement discussed in the present invention is how to prevent the micro-architectural attacks wherein the system incur high overheads and other issues related to system performance issues & etc.
Hence, subject invention addresses the issue efficiently.

Present patent describes a method & device that uses hardware performance counters to detect malicious tasks with micro-architectural attack-like behavior. (Refer Fig.1 & Fig.2)
Upon detection, the proposed method provides a mechanism to degrade and upgrade malicious program threads based on their behavior.
This significantly reduces the impact of the false-positives on benign applications, while detecting malicious threads with high accuracy using features implemented in the hardware.
The method for mitigating a micro-architectural side-channel attack by dynamically allocating resources to a plurality of applications by an electronic device, comprising a few steps shown in Fig.2.

The proposed method selectively penalizes applications that behave maliciously & the most benign applications are not affected.
Said method can be easily adapted for new attacks as long as there are at least one of a plurality of hardware performance counters/ plurality of event counters that can detect them.
The electronic device may be a cloud infrastructure provider which provides dynamic computing resources which allows virtual machines (VMs) from multiple customers to share physical resources such as servers, a server, a computer, a laptop, etc.
Efficiently brings down the cost of a false penalization.
Once a benign thread which is erroneously flagged, is unflagged, the benign thread regains the CPU share and executes without any additional overheads.

Prof. Chester Dominic Rebeiro

Department of Computer Science & Engineering

TRL – 4

Technology validated in lab scale.

Technology Transfer