Hey, You, Get Off of My Cloud:
Exploring Information Leakage in
Third-Party Compute Clouds
Thomas Ristenpart∗ Eran Tromer† Hovav Shacham∗ Stefan Savage∗
∗
Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering
†
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
University of California, San Diego, USA
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA
{tristenp,hovav,savage}@cs.ucsd.edu
tromer@csail.mit.edu
ABSTRACT
Third-party cloud computing represents the promise of out-
sourcing as applied to computation. Services, such as Mi-
crosoft’s Azure and Amazon’s EC2, allow users to instanti-
ate virtual machines (VMs) on demand and thus purchase
precisely the capacity they require when they require it.
In turn, the use of virtualization allows third-party cloud
providers to maximize the utilization of their sunk capital
costs by multiplexing many customer VMs across a shared
physical infrastructure. However, in this paper, we show
that this approach can also introduce new vulnerabilities.
Using the Amazon EC2 service as a case study, we show that
it is possible to map the internal cloud infrastructure, iden-
tify where a particular target VM is likely to reside, and then
instantiate new VMs until one is placed co-resident with the
target. We explore how such placement can then be used to
mount cross-VM side-channel attacks to extract information
from a target VM on the same machine.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.6.5 [Security and Protection]: UNAUTHORIZED AC-
CESS
General Terms
Security, Measurement, Experimentation
Keywords
Cloud computing, Virtual machine security, Side channels
1.
INTRODUCTION
It has become increasingly popular to talk of “cloud com-
puting” as the next infrastructure for hosting data and de-
ploying software and services. In addition to the plethora of
technical approaches associated with the term, cloud com-
puting is also used to refer to a new business model in which
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee p