Renounce Darkness: Employing Cache Attack for Defending Against Information Leakage in Socket-Based IPC

Socket-based IPC is widely adopted by local applications, yet it remains vulnerable to Man-in-the-Machine (MitMa) attacks, in which local unprivileged users can intercept or tamper with sensitive information. To reduce the attack surface of MitMa, we present CACHE CABLE, which transmits sensitive information covertly to defend against leakage. CACHE CABLE is the first defense-oriented use of cache covert channels, repurposed as secure endpoints for transmitting sensitive information. It integrates with socket-based IPC and dynamically activates a covert cache channel, referred to as acable, only when sensitive information needs to be sent. We design a secure and noiseresilient communication protocol, along with an application-layer protocol that ensures the reliable establishment ofcables. Our implementation demonstrates that CACHE CABLE achieves reliable, error-free transmission rates of up to 497 KB/s with minimal overhead. It effectively resists impersonation, wiretapping, tampering, and jamming attacks under the strong MitMa threat model. Evaluations show that CACHE CABLE enhances data confidentiality without sacrificing compatibility or introducing significant overhead, making it suitable for protecting sensitive interactions in widely used local applications.