SoK: So, You Think You Know All About Secure Randomized Caches?
Anubhav Bhatla
34th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security '25) · Day 2 · Hardware Security 1: Microarchitectures
In this USENIX Security talk, Anubhav Bhatla presents a comprehensive "Systemization of Knowledge" (SoK) study on **secure randomized caches**. The talk delves into the intricate design space of cache architectures engineered to thwart **Last Level Cache (LLC) side-channel attacks**. Bhatla systematically dissects various security-enhancing features, termed "knobs," and rigorously evaluates their effectiveness, both individually and in combination, against prevalent attack methodologies.
AI review
Solid SoK that does exactly what a good SoK should do: imposes structure on a fragmented design space and surfaces non-obvious results that change how you'd reason about building or evaluating a secure cache. The warm-up state finding alone — showing that load-aware skewing's security benefit collapses at 100% cache saturation — is the kind of thing that quietly invalidates prior work and deserves a wider audience. Distinguished artifact award with all three badges is a meaningful signal that the methodology is actually reproducible.