Related papers: Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-C…

An Air Force evaluation of Multics, and Ken Thompson's Turing award lecture ("Reflections on Trusting Trust"), showed that compilers can be subverted to insert malicious Trojan horses into critical software, including themselves. If this…

In his 1984 Turing Award lecture, Ken Thompson showed that a compiler could be maliciously altered to insert backdoors into programs it compiles and perpetuate this behavior by modifying any compiler it subsequently builds. Thompson's hack…

We present a new type of attack in which source code is maliciously encoded so that it appears different to a compiler and to the human eye. This attack exploits subtleties in text-encoding standards such as Unicode to produce source code…

This paper explores the parallels between Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust" and modern challenges in LLM-based code generation. We examine how Thompson's insights about compiler backdoors take on new relevance in the era of large…

The implementations of most hardened cryptographic libraries use defensive programming techniques for side-channel resistance. These techniques are usually specified as guidelines to developers on specific code patterns to use or avoid.…

Fault injection attacks can cause errors in software for malicious purposes. Oftentimes, vulnerable points of a program are detected after its development. It is therefore critical for the user of the program to be able to apply last-minute…

Deep learning (DL) compilers are core infrastructure in modern DL systems, offering flexibility and scalability beyond vendor-specific libraries. This work uncovers a fundamental vulnerability in their design: can an official, unmodified…

Fault attacks against embedded circuits enabled to define many new attack paths against secure circuits. Every attack path relies on a specific fault model which defines the type of faults that the attacker can perform. On embedded…

While vulnerability research often focuses on technical findings and post-public release industrial response, we provide an analysis of the rest of the story: the coordinated disclosure process from discovery through public release. The…

Traditional redundancy (lockstep, TMR) executes identical binaries with identical memory layouts. A single correlated fault - for example, an arbitrary program counter value or a perturbation delta-PC in all replicas - redirects all…

A Digital Twin (DT) is a digital representation of a physical object used to simulate it before it is built or to predict failures after the object is deployed. In this article, we introduce our approach, which applies the concept of a…

Environmental noise (e.g.heat, ionized particles, etc.) causes transient faults in hardware, which lead to corruption of stored values. Mission-critical devices require such faults to be mitigated by fault-tolerance --- a combination of…

Third-party intellectual property cores are essential building blocks of modern system-on-chip and integrated circuit designs. However, these design components usually come from vendors of different trust levels and may contain undocumented…

Proving secure compilation of partial programs typically requires back-translating an attack against the compiled program to an attack against the source program. To prove back-translation, one can syntactically translate the target…

Modern software deployment process produces software that is uniform, and hence vulnerable to large-scale code-reuse attacks. Compiler-based diversification improves the resilience and security of software systems by automatically…

Random testing has proven to be an effective technique for compiler validation. However, the debugging of bugs identified through random testing presents a significant challenge due to the frequent occurrence of duplicate test programs that…

The identification of vulnerabilities is an important element in the software development life cycle to ensure the security of software. While vulnerability identification based on the source code is a well studied field, the identification…

In this paper, we take a deep dive into microarchitectural security from a hardware designer's perspective by reviewing the existing approaches to detect hardware vulnerabilities during the design phase. We show that a protection gap…

Weird machines---the computational models accessible by exploiting security vulnerabilities---arise from the difference between the model a programmer has in her head of how her program should run and the implementation that actually…

Recently, it has been shown that deep learning models are vulnerable to Trojan attacks, where an attacker can install a backdoor during training time to make the resultant model misidentify samples contaminated with a small trigger patch.…