Dynamic Shader Termination and Throttling for Side-Channel Security on GPUOwl

Abstract: GPUs are becoming more and more appealing targets for side-channel attacks because of their high levels of parallelism and shared hardware resources. In order to reduce side-channel assaults on GPUs, we provide a unique dynamic shader termination and throttling approach in this research. The main concept is to use runtime profiling and heuristics to dynamically terminate and restrict the frequency and concurrency of shader programs. We use the open-source GPGPU simulator GPUOwl to implement the suggested method. Our findings show that the suggested method may successfully thwart a variety of side-channel assaults while having no influence on efficiency. Over a range of benchmarks, the average overhead introduced by the dynamic shader termination and throttling is 5.6%. At the same time, it successfully thwarts recently demonstrated cache-based and timing-based side-channel attacks on GPUs. Thus, the proposed technique offers an efficient software-based defence to enhance the side-channel security of GPUs.

Nelson Lungu, Satyendr Singh, Simon Tembo, Manoj Ranjan Mishra, Hani Moaiteq Aljahdali, Lalbihari Barik, Parthasarathi Pattnayak, Mahendra Kumar Gourisaria and Sudhansu Shekhar Patra. “Dynamic Shader Termination and Throttling for Side-Channel Security on GPUOwl”. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications (IJACSA) 15.6 (2024). http://dx.doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2024.0150674

@article{Lungu2024,
title = {Dynamic Shader Termination and Throttling for Side-Channel Security on GPUOwl},
journal = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
doi = {10.14569/IJACSA.2024.0150674},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2024.0150674},
year = {2024},
publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
volume = {15},
number = {6},
author = {Nelson Lungu and Satyendr Singh and Simon Tembo and Manoj Ranjan Mishra and Hani Moaiteq Aljahdali and Lalbihari Barik and Parthasarathi Pattnayak and Mahendra Kumar Gourisaria and Sudhansu Shekhar Patra}
}