Information-Theoretic Modeling and Analysis of Interrupt-Related Covert Channels

We present a formal model for analyzing the bandwidth of covert channels. The focus is on channels that exploit interrupt-driven communication, which have been shown to pose a serious threat in practical experiments. Our work builds on our earlier model [1], which we used to compare the effectiveness of different countermeasures against such channels. The main novel contribution of this article is an approach to exploiting detailed knowledge about a given channel in order to make the bandwidth analysis more precise.

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