Systematic Evaluation of Randomized Cache Designs against Cache Occupancy
Anirban Chakraborty
34th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security '25) · Day 2 · Hardware Security 1: Microarchitectures
This talk, presented by Anirban Chakraborty from the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, delves into a comprehensive evaluation of randomized cache designs, focusing on both their performance characteristics and, crucially, their resilience against **cache occupancy attacks**. While randomized caches have been widely adopted as a defense mechanism against well-known **side-channel attacks** like **Prime+Probe**, their efficacy against the broader class of occupancy-based attacks has largely been overlooked. This research highlights a significant gap in current security evaluations, demonstrating that many state-of-the-art randomized cache designs, despite their complex randomization schemes, remain vulnerable to information leakage through cache occupancy.
AI review
Solid systems security research that closes a real gap: randomized caches have been evaluated almost exclusively against Prime+Probe, and this work systematically demonstrates that cache occupancy is a practical, exploitable side channel against designs most practitioners assumed were hardened. The first AES key recovery via occupancy levels is the headline contribution, and it earns its place.