Preventing cryptographic key leakage in cloud virtual machines

Abstract

In a typical infrastructure-as-a-service cloud setting, different clients harness the cloud provider's services by executing virtual machines (VM). However, recent studies have shown that the cryptographic keys, the most crucial component in many of our daily used cryptographic protocols (e.g., SSL/TLS), can be extracted using cross-VM side-channel attacks. To defeat such a threat, this paper introduces HERMES, a new system that aims to protect the cryptographic keys in the cloud against any kind of cross-VM side-channel attacks by simply partitioning the cryptographic keys into random shares, and storing each share in a different VM. Moreover, it also periodically re-shares the cryptographic keys, thereby invalidating the potentially extracted partial ones. We have implemented HERMES as a library extension that is transparent to the application software, and performed deep case studies with a web and a mail server on Amazon EC2 cloud. Our experimental results show that the runtime overhead of the proposed system can be as low as 1%.