Key recovery in public clouds: A survey on cross-vm side channel attacks

Isolation across virtual machines is one of the pillars on which the cloud computing paradigm relies on, allowing efficient use of shared resources among users who experience dedicated services. However side channel attacks have been recently demonstrated possible, showing how an adversary is enabled to recover sensible information by observing the behavior of a VM co-located on the same physical machine. In this paper we survey the current attacks, focusing on the ones targeted to extract private RSA keys, and discuss some possible countermeasures, offering a picture of the security challenges cloud providers need to address in order to provide strong guarantees to their customers.