An attacker places a malicious VM on the same physical server as a target VM...

CEH cloud modules explain that side-channel attacks exploit indirect information leakage based on hardware characteristics—such as CPU timing, power usage, cache access patterns, or electromagnetic emissions. In virtualized cloud environments, multiple tenants share the same physical hardware, creating opportunities for attackers to extract sensitive data from neighboring virtual machines. By placing a malicious VM on the same host as the victim, an attacker can measure minute differences in timing during cryptographic operations, allowing them to infer private keys or sensitive computations. This aligns precisely with CEH’s definition of a side-channel attack. Cryptojacking involves unauthorized cryptocurrency mining, CPDoS targets caching layers rather than key extraction, and metadata spoofing manipulates cloud metadata endpoints. Only side-channel analysis matches the described attack behavior.