Side-Channel Attack

Term: Side-Channel Attack (in virtualization)

Definition: An attack that recovers secrets not by breaking a cryptographic hash directly, but by analyzing indirect signals like timing, cache use, or power consumption of a shared system. In virtualization, side-channel attacks often target shared resources between VMs on the same host to extract sensitive data.

Context/Example: On a shared cloud host, a malicious VM measures CPU cache timings to infer what another VM is doing and extract cryptographic keys.

Related Concepts: Multi-Tenancy