Attack Steals Crypto Key From Co-Located Virtual Machines

Gunkerty Jeb writes "Side-channel attacks against cryptography keys have, until now, been limited to physical machines. Researchers have long made accurate determinations about crypto keys by studying anything from variations in power consumption to measuring how long it takes for a computation to complete. A team of researchers from the University of North Carolina, University of Wisconsin, and RSA Security has ramped up the stakes, having proved in controlled conditions (PDF) that it's possible to steal a crypto key from a virtual machine. The implications for sensitive transactions carried out on public cloud infrastructures could be severe should an attacker land his malicious virtual machine on the same physical host as the victim. Research has already been conducted on how to map a cloud infrastructure and identify where a target virtual machine is likely to be."

Comments

Don't trust hardware you don't own.

[Anonymous Coward]

"public cloud infrastructure". The very thought of that makes me cringe, then laugh at the absurdity of it.

We can't even code bug free operating systems. What makes anyone think we can code a bug free hypervisor? I'm still confused as to why people believe that VMs are inherently secure- are they secure because VMware/Xen/Oracle says they are? Or are they secure because they've been tried and tested in the fires of time? All I ever see about hypervisors these days is some inflated marketing terms or new "cloud" interoperability features or some other random junk that solves an imaginary problem someone first had to go out of their way to create. I've never seen anyone actually come out and say "This version of our hypervisor is even more secure then the last because of XYZ!".

The company I work for makes extensive use of "cloud influenced" features in-house. It's awesome to be able to two-click a LAMP stack into existence through a nice web portal or do the same for a couple of Win2K8 instances. Some idiot was preaching about outsourcing our hardware to someone else and putting everything "in the cloud". Luckily management saw it for the farce it was and put that guy in his place pretty quickly.

So again, I'm really curious as to why people explicitly trust: A) Their services/platforms to someone other then themselves, and B) expect that VM hypervisors are bullet proof.

Re:Don't trust hardware you don't own.

[photon317]

I don't think reasonable people expect hypervisors to be bulletproof. Security is a sliding scale though, and for many purposes the security level offered by a responsible cloud provider is good enough for what they're hosting there. If my bank hosted their critical system in AWS, I'd freak out. If Pandora hosts systems there to stream music to me? I could care less. If Pandora puts their billing system there that has my credit card number? Ok, I start to care a little more, but the risk is manageable if they're being careful about the design, and ultimately if someone rips their whole CC database, my CC company or I will notice the fraud activity quickly and issue me a new card. Life goes on.

Why do companies want to use virtualized infrastructure in the first place? Because it offloads work that's not directly relevant to their business. Let me quote directly from Bruce Perens' recent Ask Slashdot responses:

There is no point in having your own programmers write anything that is not a customer-visible business differentiator for your company if you can get it from the Open Source community. A “business differentiator” in this case means something that makes your company look better than a competitor, to the customer directly. Too much “glue code”, and “infrastructure” is written by organizations that have no real need to do so if they would adopt Open Source. The message that is driving them to do so is the huge stack of cash being made by the companies that do use us.

He was talking about it making sense for companies to build on top of OSS lower-layers. The same applies to the cloud infrastructure stuff. For most businesses, infrastructure is not a differentiator anymore. Why have company employees concerned with managing network switches, racks, cooling systems, datacenter fire protection codes and systems, insurance, servers? Or calling vendors and leading them in the building to replace failed drives and RAM modules, or even giving a crap about hardware at all?

If my company's purpose in life is to deliver, e.g., some social iPhone app and a backend network service that supports it, I have no differentiating interest in that level of infrastructure. I still need an IT department, but it can be a small one focused on using that cloud infrastructure correctly (e.g. security, configuration management, etc). When you can shift off that whole layer of complexity to a large-scale specialist, you've reduced the total complexity your company has to manage directly. Focus on the areas that matter, not the common ground. Did your company design, engineer, and build its own kitchen appliances for the company breakroom? Didn't think so...

Re:Don't trust hardware you don't own.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the details of what's actually been done are relevant here.

This is a side-channel attack against a specific piece of code which has a very clear operational signature.

It's a brute-force implementation of exponentiation mod p using repeated squaring, such that bits from the key directly result in jump operations, and one side of the jump is very cheap and one side is very expensive. Modern implementations of the same exponentiation process (e.g. in OpenSSL) have optimizations which prevent this from being the case.

It is amazing that it's been done at all, but the number of assumptions it rests on regarding precisely what the other VM is running do seem to make it an attack of little practical value. This is more a piece of interesting math than it is an indictment of cross-VM security. And the appropriate response is probably some more neat math to make an algorithm for the same problem which is provably not attackable via this methodology.

Not Likely Reproducible in Production Environment

[Traiano]

Before anyone gets carried away, here are a few important quotes from TFA:

• "We assume the attacker knows the software running on the victim VM and has access to a copy of it"
• "We demonstrate how to use interprocess interrupts (IPIs) to abuse the Xen credit scheduler in order to arrange for frequent interruptions of the victim’s execution by a spy process running from within the attacker’s VM...[then much later]...we leverage the tendency of the Xen credit scheduler to give the highest run priority to a VCPU that receives an interrupt."
• "We will only be able to spy on the victim when assigned to the same PCPU, which may coincide with only some fraction of the victim’s execution."

In other words, this exploit requires: knowing what cryptographic software is being run, the presence of Xen and an apparent security hole therein, and lucky core colocation of the VMs in an environment that could easily have dozens of VMs running against more than a dozen cores "over the course of a few hours".

In short, all of this is unlikely to be reproducible outside of a lab.