HyperDegrade Proof-of-Concept

Summary

This document is for reproducing one of the research results from the paper "HyperDegrade: From GHz to MHz Effective CPU Frequencies", to appear at the 31st USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Sec 2022).

It is for reproducing the results in Section 4 of the paper, including Tables 8-9.

The instructions assume the root directory of the archive you are reading now is as follows.

cd /path/to/hyperd/

Requirements on Ubuntu

sudo apt install git build-essential python3 linux-tools-common linux-tools-generic linux-tools-`uname -r`

Enable perf

echo "-1" | sudo tee /proc/sys/kernel/perf_event_paranoid

Building BEEBS benchmark suite

You only have to build the binaries once.

cd /path/to/hyperd/
git clone https://github.com/mageec/beebs.git

At the time of this writing, the most recent commit on the master branch of the beebs repo is: 049ded9f3aeb5591f553879d3a0376b8614e9422

Build all benchmarks as follows. (Linking statically.)

cd /path/to/hyperd/beebs/
patch -p1 < ../beebs.patch
./configure --build=x86_64
make MAKEINFO=true

Shared parts

There's a post-processing script to build as a shared library.

cd /path/to/hyperd/
./build_shared.sh

Build degrade tooling

cd /path/to/hyperd/
make clean
make

You should now have the degrade binary.

Benchmark experiments

Running all experiments takes a significant amount of time (~50h), especially for Degrade and HyperDegrade strategies.

You can run a partial experiment that should take 2 hours to complete using: run_all.sh small.

For full experiment run: run_all.sh.

Benchmark results will appear in the bench_*.json files.

Run experiment

You can also execute the experiments on demand.

For the baseline experiment with no degrading (NoDegrade):

cd /path/to/hyperd/
./degrade.sh A

To degrade from a different physical core (Degrade):

cd /path/to/hyperd/
./degrade.sh B

To degrade from the same physical core (HyperDegrade):

cd /path/to/hyperd/
./degrade.sh C

Parse results and compare

After completing the experiment we should have three json files, one for each degrade strategy. If no other json files are in path/ you can parse and see the results using:

cd /path/to/hyperd/
python3 compare.py path/bench*.json

Credits

Authors

• Alejandro Cabrera Aldaya (Tampere University, Tampere, Finland)
• Billy Bob Brumley (Tampere University, Tampere, Finland)

Funding

• This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 804476).
• Supported in part by CSIC's i-LINK+ 2019 "Advancing in cybersecurity technologies" (Ref. LINKA20216).

License

This work is released under the MIT License.