Secure Dynamic Memory Scheduling Against Timing Channel Attacks

Yao Wang, Benjamin Wu, G. Edward Suh

Abstract: This paper presents SecMC, a secure memory controller that provides efficient memory scheduling with a strong quantitative security guarantee against timing channel attacks. The first variant, named SecMC-NI, eliminates timing channels while allowing a tight memory schedule by interleaving memory requests that access different banks or ranks. Experimental results show that SecMC-NI significantly (45% on average) improves the performance of the best known scheme that does not rely on restricting memory placements. To further improve the performance, the paper proposes SecMC-Bound, which enables trading-off security for performance with a quantitative information theoretic bound on information leakage. The experimental results show that allowing small information leakage can yield significant performance improvements.