TY - JOUR
T1 - A covert queueing channel in fcfs schedulers
AU - Ghassami, Amiremad
AU - Kiyavash, Negar
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received August 27, 2017; revised December 27, 2017; accepted January 2, 2018. Date of publication January 25, 2018; date of current version February 12, 2018. This work was supported in part by MURI under Grant ARMY W911NF-15-1-0479, Navy N00014-16-1-2804, and in part by NSF CNS under Grant 17-18952. This paper was presented in part at the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, Hong Kong, June 14–19, 2015 [1]. The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Dr. Lifeng Lai. (Corresponding author: AmirEmad Ghassami.) A. Ghassami is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Coordinated Science Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801 USA (e-mail: ghassam2@illinois.edu).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 IEEE.
PY - 2018/6
Y1 - 2018/6
N2 - We study covert queueing channels (CQCs), which are a kind of covert timing channel that may be exploited in shared queues across supposedly isolated users. In our system model, a user sends messages to another user via his pattern of access to the shared resource, which serves the users according to a first come first served (FCFS) policy. One example of such a channel is the cross-virtual network covert channel in data center networks, resulting from the queueing effects of the shared resource. First, we study a system comprising a transmitter and a receiver that share a deterministic and work-conserving FCFS scheduler, and we compute the capacity of this channel. We also consider the effect of the presence of other users on the information transmission rate of this channel. The achievable information transmission rates obtained in this paper demonstrate the possibility of significant information leakage and great privacy threats brought by CQCs in FCFS schedulers.
AB - We study covert queueing channels (CQCs), which are a kind of covert timing channel that may be exploited in shared queues across supposedly isolated users. In our system model, a user sends messages to another user via his pattern of access to the shared resource, which serves the users according to a first come first served (FCFS) policy. One example of such a channel is the cross-virtual network covert channel in data center networks, resulting from the queueing effects of the shared resource. First, we study a system comprising a transmitter and a receiver that share a deterministic and work-conserving FCFS scheduler, and we compute the capacity of this channel. We also consider the effect of the presence of other users on the information transmission rate of this channel. The achievable information transmission rates obtained in this paper demonstrate the possibility of significant information leakage and great privacy threats brought by CQCs in FCFS schedulers.
KW - Capacity limit
KW - Covert queueing channel
KW - First-come-first-served scheduler
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U2 - 10.1109/TIFS.2018.2797953
DO - 10.1109/TIFS.2018.2797953
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85041007250
SN - 1556-6013
VL - 13
SP - 1551
EP - 1563
JO - IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
JF - IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
IS - 6
ER -