Covert Channels in Information Security: Lecture 40

Welcome to 'Information Security 5 Secure Systems Engineering' course !

This lecture delves into the world of covert channels, focusing on how microarchitectural features, specifically cache memory, can be exploited to bypass traditional security measures. It starts by revisiting information flow policies like Bell-LaPadula and BIBA, emphasizing their limitations in the face of covert channels. The lecture then explains the concept of cache covert channels, showcasing how seemingly isolated processes can communicate by strategically accessing shared cache lines. It provides an example of a cache covert channel, demonstrating how data can be transmitted through cache timing variations. The lecture concludes by discussing the challenges of identifying and mitigating covert channels and introducing the notion of communication rate as a metric for quantifying their severity. Viewers will gain an understanding of how subtle hardware interactions can create security loopholes and the need for comprehensive security analyses that consider covert channel vulnerabilities.
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