Abstract
When multiple job processes are served by a single scheduler, the queueing delays of one process are often affected by the others, resulting in a timing side channel that leaks the arrival pattern of one process to the others. In this work, we study such a timing side channel between a regular user and a malicious attacker. Utilizing Shannon's mutual information as a measure of information leakage between the user and attacker, we analyze privacy-preserving behaviors of common work-conserving schedulers. We find that the attacker can always learn perfectly the user's arrival process in a longest-queue-first (LQF) scheduler. When the user's job arrival rate is very low (near zero), first-come-first-serve (FCFS) and round-robin schedulers both completely reveal the user's arrival pattern. The near-complete information leakage in the low-rate traffic region is proven to be reduced by half in a work-conserving version of TDMA (WC-TDMA) scheduler, which turns out to be privacy-optimal in the class of deterministic working-conserving (det-WC) schedulers, according to a universal lower bound on information leakage we derive for all det-WC schedulers.
Original language | English (US) |
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Article number | 7128754 |
Pages (from-to) | 1841-1852 |
Number of pages | 12 |
Journal | IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking |
Volume | 24 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jun 2016 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Software
- Computer Science Applications
- Computer Networks and Communications
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering