A Decade in Software-Based Side and Covert Channel Attacks and Countermeasures: A Survey

As technology continues to evolve, it provides significant benefits, such as seamless access to information, while also introducing critical security challenges, including privacy vulnerabilities and the rapid spread of misinformation. One major class of security threats involves software-based attacks, divided in side-channel attacks, which exploit unintended information leakage, and covert-channel attacks, which establish unauthorized communication pathways to bypass security policies. This survey provides a comprehensive review of the most cited attacks of these types in the past decade, along with their associated countermeasures. We classify the attacks and countermeasures based on the targeted system component and fundamental attack mechanisms. In addition, we conduct a comparative analysis of the attacks, considering key aspects such as attack methodology, targeted algorithms, victim system environment, reliability, performance impact, and mitigation strategies. Furthermore, we examine defense mechanisms, assessing their effectiveness, computational overhead, and applicability across various attack scenarios. Finally, we discuss emerging trends in attack techniques and countermeasures, highlighting open challenges and future research directions to secure modern computing systems.