Co-location detection on the Cloud

Abstract

In this work we focus on the problem of co-location as a first step of conducting Cross-VM attacks such as Prime and Probe or Flush+Reload in commercial clouds. We demonstrate and compare three co-location detection methods namely, cooperative Last-Level Cache (LLC) covert channel, software profiling on the LLC and memory bus locking. We conduct our experiments on three commercial clouds, Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine and Microsoft Azure. Finally, we show that both cooperative and non-cooperative co-location to specific targets on cloud is still possible on major cloud services