Governing the KV Cache: Preventing Timing Side-Channel Leakage in Multi-Tenant LLM Inference
The key-value (KV) cache is the primary throughput optimization in modern large language model (LLM) inference, enabling prefix reuse across requests. In multi-tenant deployments this cache is shared across tenants, creating a timing side channel: an adversarial tenant can reconstruct another tenant's private prompt by probing cache-hit latency. Three published attacks exploit it -- PROMPTPEEK, EarlyBird and InputSnatch -- reaching up to 100% attack success rate against unprotected vLLM and SGLang, with rates varying by cache architecture and prompt structure. We present KVGov, a governance layer addressing all three attack families' prefix-cache paths under one mechanism. A per-principal...
| Authors | Tejasvi C. Addagada |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 10 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 August 2026 |
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