DVFSspy: Using Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling as a Covert Channel for Multiple Procedures
Author
Abstract

Multicore Computing Security - Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) is a widely deployed low-power technology in modern systems. In this paper, we discover a vulnerability in the implementation of the DVFS technology that allows us to measure the processor’s frequency in the userspace. By exploiting this vulnerability, we successfully implement a covert channel on the commercial Intel platform and demonstrate that the covert channel can reach a throughput of 28.41bps with an error rate of 0.53\%. This work indicates that the processor’s hardware information that is unintentionally leaked to the userspace by the privileged kernel modules may cause security risks.

Year of Publication
2022
Date Published
jan
Publisher
IEEE
Conference Location
Taipei, Taiwan
ISBN Number
978-1-66542-135-5
URL
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9712588/
DOI
10.1109/ASP-DAC52403.2022.9712588
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