New Research Shows How To Thwart The Cleverest Computer Attackers

Attacks that use such indirect sources of information are called side-channel attacks, and the increasing popularity of cloud computing makes them an even greater threat. An attacker would have to be pretty motivated to install a device in your wall to measure your computer's power consumption. However it's comparatively easy to load a bit of code on a server in the cloud and eavesdrop on other applications it's running.

At the Association for Computing Machinery's Symposium on Theory of Computing in May, Goldwasser and colleagues will present a paper demonstrating how the technique she developed with Rothblum can be adapted to protect information processed on web servers.

The report by Goldwasser and Rothblum describes a type of compiler, a program that takes code written in a form intelligible to humans and converts it into the low-level instruction intelligible to a computer. There, the computational modules are an abstraction: The instruction that inaugurates a new module looks no different from the instruction that concluded the last one. However in the STOC paper, the modules are executed on different servers on a network.

Moreover, Smart says, previous work on side-channel attacks tended to focus on the threat posed to handheld devices, just as cellphones and smart cards. "It would seem to me that the stuff in other words more likely to take off eventually is the stuff that's talking about servers," Smart says. "I don't know anyone else outside MIT who's looking at that."