How secure is your cache against side-channel attacks?

Security-critical data can leak through very unexpected side channels, making side-channel attacks very dangerous threats to information security. Of these, cache-based side-channel attacks are some of the most problematic. This is because caches are essential for the performance of modern computers, but an intrinsic property of all caches - the different access times for cache hits and misses - is the property exploited to leak information in time-based cache side-channel attacks. Recently, different secure cache architectures have been proposed to defend against these attacks. However, we do not have a reliable method for evaluating a cache's resilience against different classes of cache side-channel attacks, which is the goal of this paper.