SoK: So, You Think You Know All About Secure Randomized Caches?

Anubhav Bhatla, Hari Rohit Bhavsar, Sayandeep Saha, Biswabandan Panda

This Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) paper, titled "SoK: So, You Think You Know All About Secure Randomized Caches?", delivers a comprehensive and systematic analysis of the microarchitectural modifications, termed "security knobs," employed in state-of-the-art secure randomized Last-Level Cache (LLC) designs. Authored by Anubhav Bhatla, Hari Rohit Bhavsar, Sayandeep Saha, and Biswabandan Panda from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, this distinguished artifact award-winning work addresses a critical gap in the understanding of how individual design choices contribute to the overall security posture of randomized caches against prevalent side-channel attacks.

AI review

This is the ablation study the randomized cache literature has needed for years. IIT Bombay systematically isolates five security knobs—skewing, extra invalid tags, high associativity, replacement policy, remapping—and proves which combinations actually matter. The finding that decoupled tag/data stores provide zero security benefit, despite being a centerpiece of Mirage's design, is the kind of result that should make architects uncomfortable.