SideLink: Exposing NVLink to Covert and Side-Channel Attacks Official Work-in-Progress Paper
摘要
For the past decades, covert and side channels have posed significant threats to user privacy in computing systems, targeting almost every component. In this paper, we present SideLink, a novel attack that exploits the NVLink bus for covert communication and information leakage. NVLink is a recent bus in the NVIDIA GPU systems known for its high bandwidth, which became a necessity for AI applications in data centers. Despite the extremely high bandwidth, we investigated its contention characteristics and built the first contention-based covert channel, and observed the presence of a side channel on the NVLink interconnect bus for the first time. We evaluated SideLink against NVIDIA DGX A100, a widely used system in data centers and cloud environments nowadays. The covert channel reached a bandwidth of 8.8 Kbps with a negligible error rate. Moreover, we demonstrated the side channel through an application fingerprinting attack using a deep learning FCN model, achieving an accuracy of 93.1%, which involved collecting the first dataset consisting of latency traces of the NVLink bus from applications running on dual-GPU systems.