Author
Jahangir Hasan, Ankit Jalote, T.N. Vijaykumar, Carla Brodley
Abstract
In the past, there have been several denial-of-service
(DOS) attacks which exhaust some shared resource (e.g.,
physical memory, process table, file descriptors, TCP connections)
of the targeted machine. Though these attacks
have been addressed, it is important to continue to identify
and address new attacks because DOS is one of most prominent
methods used to cause significant financial loss. A
recent paper shows how to prevent attacks that exploit the
sharing of pipeline resources (e.g., shared trace cache) in
SMT to degrade the performance of normal threads. In this
paper, we show that power density can be exploited in SMT
to launch a novel DOS attack, called heat stroke. Heat
stroke repeatedly accesses a shared resource to create a hot
spot at the resource. Current solutions to hot spots inevitably
involve slowing down the pipeline to let the hot spot cool
down. Consequently, heat stroke slows down the entire SMT
pipeline and severely degrades normal threads. We present a
solution to heat stroke by identifying the thread that causes
the hot spot and selectively slowing down the malicious
thread while minimally affecting normal threads.
