The Public Cloud – Side Channel attacks

As Public Cloud is built on shared infrastructures, services may introduce new security problems that have yet to be fully explored.  In experiments security experts showed that they could pull off some very basic versions of what are known as side-channel attacks.  A side-channel attacker looks at indirect information related to the computer — the electromagnetic emanations from screens or keyboards, i.e. to determine what is going on in the machine.

The researchers were able to pinpoint the physical server used by programs running on the public cloud and then extract small amounts of data from these programs, by placing their own software there and launching a side-channel attack.  Other examples of side-channel attacks are:

• Determine the actual physical machine your VPS is sitting on
• Can place malicious code on the same physical machine as you as hosted on
• Can directly attack your VPS from the same machine
• Can see what your machine is doing i.e. which webpage is loading
• Denial of Service attacks

For more security information on the Cloud see our Top 5 Cloud computing security issues paper.