A New Class of Covert Channels Exploiting Power Management Vulnerabilities

Abstract

Effective runtime power management requires hardware activity to be tracked at a very fine granularity in both space and time in order to meet diverse workload performance requirements within a tight power budget. As the available instantaneous power budget itself represents a shared resource, this practically translates into finding the optimal allocation of the power budget among active tasks of execution. Covert communication over a previously unexplored class of channels thereby becomes possible, which forms the focus of this paper.