Abstract
Virtualization and cloud computing have become critical parts of modern enterprise computing infrastructure. One of the benefits of using cloud infrastructure over in-house computing infrastructure is the offloading of security responsibilities. By hosting one’s services on the cloud, the responsibility for the security of the infrastructure is transferred to a trusted third party. As such, security of customer data in cloud environments is of critical importance. Side channels and covert channels have proven to be dangerous avenues for the leakage of sensitive information from computing systems. In this work, we propose and perform two experiments to investigate side and covert channel possibilities in virtual, enterprise environments. The first experiment is centered around the use of sensor data available via Intelligent Platform Management Interface, an open standard for out-of-band management often shipped with enterprise-level servers. We show how power-related sensors available with minimal user privilege over IPMI can be correlated with the levels of CPU stress of a virtual machine on a server. This leads to our second experiment, in which we demonstrate a power analysis approach for establishing a covert channel for the exfiltration of data from a network-isolated virtual machine on a server rack. By applying the concept of power analysis more broadly to the power consumption of an entire server rack, rather than individual hardware components, we find that basic patterns in system load can be clearly identified using signal processing techniques, demonstrating the potential for establishing a covert channel.
Degree Date
Spring 2023
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
M.S.
Department
Computer Science and Engineering
Advisor
Dr. Mitchell A. Thornton
Second Advisor
Dr. Eric C. Larson
Third Advisor
Dr. Michael A. Taylor
Subject Area
Computer Science
Number of Pages
58
Format
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Recommended Citation
Wolf, Zechariah D.J., "Data Leakage in Isolated Virtualized Enterprise Computing Systems" (2023). Computer Science and Engineering Theses and Dissertations. 32.
https://scholar.smu.edu/engineering_compsci_etds/32
