CPU cache-based communication between two co-located virtual machines

Re:CPU cache-based communication between two co-located virt... by j_s on Thursday March 30, 2017 @02:04PM (#13997535)

With virtual machines I control, I don't have to use covert channels?

https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~hovav/dist/cloudsec.pdf (2009)

Edit: we describe an empirical mea-surement study focused on understanding VM placement in the EC2 system and achieving co-resident placement for an adversary. To do this, we make use of network probing both to identify public services hosted on EC2 and to provide evidence of co-residence (that two instances share the same physical server). In particular, we utilize nmap, hping, and wget to perform network probes to determine liveness of EC2 instances

The hard disk contention channel was used in Section 6 for establishing co-residence of instances.

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Re:CPU cache-based communication between two co-located virt... by Florin_Andrei on Thursday March 30, 2017 @02:29PM (#13997726)

That assumes the provider will disclose hardware info to you, which is rarely the case.

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Re:CPU cache-based communication between two co-located virt... by j_s on Thursday March 30, 2017 @02:44PM (#13997854)

(I apologize in advance if I've missed recognition of your authority on this topic; as an outsider it appears you are wrong.)

Are you speaking generally or specifically addressing a shortcoming of the linked paper which demonstrates a methodology to determine whether or not two AWS VMs are on the same physical host?

After a brief review I still don't see any mention of "hardware info" you mention as assumed being available.

Edit: If something has come up since 2009 with this specific paper, I'd appreciate the heads-up!

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