  Side-channel attacks have become prominent attack surfaces in cyberspace.
Attackers use the side information generated by the system while performing a
task. Among the various side-channel attacks, cache side-channel attacks are
leading as there has been an enormous growth in cache memory size in last
decade, especially Last Level Cache (LLC). The adversary infers the information
from the observable behavior of shared cache memory. This paper covers the
detailed study of cache side-channel attacks and compares different
microarchitectures in the context of side-channel attacks. Our main
contributions are: (1) We have summarized the fundamentals and essentials of
side-channel attacks and various attack surfaces (taxonomies). We also
discussed different exploitation techniques, highlighting their capabilities
and limitations. (2) We discussed cache side-channel attacks and analyzed the
existing literature on cache side-channel attacks on various parameters like
microarchitectures, cross-core exploitation, methodology, target, etc. (3) We
discussed the detailed analysis of the existing mitigation strategies to
prevent cache side-channel attacks. The analysis includes hardware- and
software-based countermeasures, examining their strengths and weaknesses. We
also discussed the challenges and trade-offs associated with mitigation
strategies. This survey is supposed to provide a deeper understanding of the
threats posed by these attacks to the research community with valuable insights
into effective defense mechanisms.
