Cloud security reaches silicon

Grazed from MIT News.  Author: Larry Hardesty.

In the last 10 years, computer security researchers have shown that malicious hackers don’t need to see your data in order to steal your data. From the pattern in which your computer accesses its memory banks, adversaries can infer a shocking amount about what’s stored there.

The risk of such attacks is particularly acute in the cloud, where you have no control over whose applications are sharing server space with yours. An antagonist could load up multiple cloud servers with small programs that do nothing but spy on other people’s data…

Two years ago, researchers in the group of MIT’s Srini Devadas, the Edwin Sibley Webster Professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, proposed a method for thwarting these types of attacks by disguising memory-access patterns. Now, they’ve begun to implement it in hardware…

Read more from the source @ http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/cloud-security-chips-0223