Cross-tenant side-channel attacks in PaaS clouds
We present a new attack framework for conducting cache- based side-channel attacks and demonstrate this framework in attacks between tenants on commercial Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) clouds. Our framework uses the Flush- Reload attack of Gullasch et al. as a primitive, and ex- tends this work by leveraging it within an automaton-driven strategy for tracing a victim's execution. We leverage our framework first to confirm co-location of tenants and then to extract secrets across tenant boundaries. We specifically demonstrate attacks to collect potentially sensitive application data (e.g., the number of items in a shopping cart), to hijack user accounts, and to break SAML single sign-on. To the best of our knowledge, our attacks are the first granular, cross-tenant, side-channel attacks successfully demonstrated on state-of-the-art commercial clouds, PaaS or otherwise. Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).
