MSc Thesis Presentation - Rut Vora

Name: Rut Vora

Date: Mar 14, 2025

Time: 11:00 AM

Location: ICCS 246

Supervisor: Aastha Mehta

Committee: Aastha Mehta, Margo Seltzer, Nguyen Phong Hoang

Title: Side-Channel Security in Networks: From the Internet to Interconnects

Abstract: In today's interconnected world, the protection of data during transmission is crucial to maintaining privacy and security.

While encryption effectively secures the contents of transmitted data, it fails to conceal associated metadata, such as packet sizes and timings, which can be exploited in network side-channel attacks.

These attacks have been widely studied in Internet and data centre networks but are under-explored in interconnects.

We first present NetShaper, a modular and scalable system designed to mitigate network side-channel attacks in Internet networks.

NetShaper provides the user with the facility to customise their own trade-offs between the side-channel mitigation guarantees, bandwidth overhead, and latency overhead.

Secondly, we present new attack vectors in the PCIe interconnect that do not necessitate saturating the PCIe link.

These findings contribute to the broader goal of designing more resilient and secure communication mechanisms.