Understanding the Security of Secure Randomized Caches

An overview of the MAYA cache design

Guides:Prof. Biswabandan Panda, Prof. Sayandeep Saha

Funded by the Intel India Research Fellowship

MIRAGE and MAYA are state-of-the-art secure randomized cache designs that offer strong security guarantees against conflict-based attacks. However, they introduce various modifications to a traditional set-associative cache. These changes, though provide complete security, are not completely understood and it’s not completely clear as to when and how these “security knobs” work. Our work identifies these “knobs” in modern secure randomized cache designs and explains their inner workings. We also look at complex combinations of these knobs and how they interact with one another with the goal of identifying the minimal set of these knobs to secure a traditional set-associative cache.