[2607.17518] Isolation Failure From Shared Storage: Characterizing and Exploiting Page-Cache SCA Leakage Across Containers and VMs

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Computer Science > Hardware Architecture

arXiv:2607.17518 (cs)

[Submitted on 20 Jul 2026]

Title:Isolation Failure From Shared Storage: Characterizing and Exploiting Page-Cache SCA Leakage Across Containers and VMs

Authors:Alon Abudraham (1), Xingyu Chen (2), Itamar Levi (1), Ari Trachtenberg (2) ((1) Bar-Ilan University, (2) Boston University)<br>View a PDF of the paper titled Isolation Failure From Shared Storage: Characterizing and Exploiting Page-Cache SCA Leakage Across Containers and VMs, by Alon Abudraham (1) and 4 other authors

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Abstract:Modern cloud platforms increasingly combine strong software isolation mechanisms with shared hardware resources to improve performance and resource efficiency. Conventional containers do this by sharing the host kernel directly, whereas sandboxed runtimes (e.g., gVisor) and VM-based runtimes (e.g., Kata, QEMU/KVM) provide progressively stronger isolation. In all cases, when tenants access host-backed filesystem state, the host page cache can remain shared and observable. Although OS-managed, this page-cache channel forms an OS-mediated microarchitectural timing side channel whose signal is shaped by the processor microarchitecture, memory and storage hierarchies, and virtualization mechanisms. We thus investigate whether unprivileged timing measurements can reveal page-cache residency across these isolation boundaries. Our evaluation covers Docker; gVisor with systrap and KVM; Kata Containers using QEMU and Cloud Hypervisor with shared host filesystems; Kata using QEMU, Cloud Hypervisor, and Firecracker with block-device-backed storage; and QEMU/KVM virtual machines under multiple host cache policies. Our results show that the timing signal persists whenever the I/O path exposes shared, host-cacheable file-backed objects, including under OverlayFS layers, virtio-fs exports, and loop-backed block devices. However, direct I/O and dedicated block devices substantially attenuate or eliminate the signal. Virtualization therefore reshapes leakage through added latency and algorithmic noise but does not remove the underlying dependence on shared hardware and cache state. We showcase this through a case study in which we recover coarse-grained activity from a WordPress deployment backed by MySQL. These results place page-cache attacks within the broader class of OS-mediated microarchitectural timing channels and motivate coordinated hardware, virtualization, and OS support for timing isolation.

Comments:<br>22 pages, 6 figures, 8 tables

Subjects:

Hardware Architecture (cs.AR); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Operating Systems (cs.OS)

MSC classes:<br>N/A

ACM classes:<br>B.3.2; D.4.6; D.4.2; C.4

Cite as:<br>arXiv:2607.17518 [cs.AR]

(or<br>arXiv:2607.17518v1 [cs.AR] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.17518

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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history<br>From: Ari Trachtenberg [view email]<br>[v1]<br>Mon, 20 Jul 2026 03:47:34 UTC (546 KB)

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View a PDF of the paper titled Isolation Failure From Shared Storage: Characterizing and Exploiting Page-Cache SCA Leakage Across Containers and VMs, by Alon Abudraham (1) and 4 other authors<br>View PDF<br>HTML (experimental)<br>TeX Source

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