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Cloud computing promises great efficiencies by multiplexing resources among disparate customers. For example, Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Microsoft Azure, Google's Compute Engine, and Rack-space Hosting all offer Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions that pack multiple customer virtual machines (VMs) onto the same physical server.

The gained efficiencies have some cost: past work has shown that the performance of one customer's VM can suffer due to interference from another. In experiments on a local testbed, we found that the performance of a cache-sensitive benchmark can degrade by more than 80% because of interference from another VM.

This interference incentivizes a new class of attacks, that we call resource-freeing attacks (RFAs). The goal is to modify the workload of a victim VM in a way that frees up resources for the attacker's VM. We explore in depth a particular example …