An attack where an attacker runs a virtual machine on the same physical host as the victim to exploit shared resources to steal data such as cryptographic keys is called?

An attack where an attacker runs a virtual machine on the same physical host as the victim to exploit shared resources to steal data such as cryptographic keys is called?

• A. Side Channel Attack
• B. Phishing
• C. DoS
• D. Malware

Answer: (A)

This is about a side-channel attack. Instead of breaking cryptography directly, a side-channel attack looks at information leaked by how a system behaves—its timing, power usage, electromagnetic emissions, or, in a virtualized setup, how shared hardware resources like caches and memory buses are used. When an attacker runs a virtual machine on the same physical host as the victim, they can monitor these shared resources and, from patterns such as how long certain operations take or which cache lines are touched during cryptographic computations, infer secret data like cryptographic keys. This kind of leakage happens even if the attacker never sees the data itself, only how the system behaves while processing it. Phishing involves tricking users into revealing credentials, which is unrelated to observing hardware behavior. DoS aims to exhaust resources to make a service unavailable. Malware refers to malicious software that can cause harm in many ways, but the specific scenario described—exploiting shared hardware resources to extract secrets from another process—belongs to the side-channel family.

This is about a side-channel attack. Instead of breaking cryptography directly, a side-channel attack looks at information leaked by how a system behaves—its timing, power usage, electromagnetic emissions, or, in a virtualized setup, how shared hardware resources like caches and memory buses are used. When an attacker runs a virtual machine on the same physical host as the victim, they can monitor these shared resources and, from patterns such as how long certain operations take or which cache lines are touched during cryptographic computations, infer secret data like cryptographic keys. This kind of leakage happens even if the attacker never sees the data itself, only how the system behaves while processing it.

Phishing involves tricking users into revealing credentials, which is unrelated to observing hardware behavior. DoS aims to exhaust resources to make a service unavailable. Malware refers to malicious software that can cause harm in many ways, but the specific scenario described—exploiting shared hardware resources to extract secrets from another process—belongs to the side-channel family.