How Sharp is SHARP ?

Cross-core last-level cache based side-channel attacks are becoming practical, affecting all forms of computing devices like mobiles, desktops, servers, and cloud based systems. Mitigating last-level cache based side channel attacks has become an active area of research and many proposals target to mitigate cross-core based conflict attacks. Secure Cache Hierarchy Aware Replacement Policy (SHARP) is one of the recent proposals that mitigate the conflict attacks by changing the underlying last-level cache replacement policy. Though SHARP is an elegant proposal; there are many subtle points, which were not part of the original SHARP proposal that appeared in the ISCA ’17. Through this paper, we discuss and debate the subtle issues that are left unanswered in the original SHARP paper.

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