Related papers: Your Processor Leaks Information - and There's Not…
We propose a method, based on program analysis and transformation, for eliminating timing side channels in software code that implements security-critical applications. Our method takes as input the original program together with a list of…
Detection and quantification of information leaks through timing side channels are important to guarantee confidentiality. Although static analysis remains the prevalent approach for detecting timing side channels, it is computationally…
Modern processor designs use a variety of microarchitectural methods to achieve high performance. Unfortunately, new side-channels have often been uncovered that exploit these enhanced designs. One area that has received little attention…
Timing side channels have been used to extract cryptographic keys and sensitive documents, even from trusted enclaves. In this paper, we focus on cache side channels created by access to shared code or data in the memory hierarchy. This…
Covert channel attacks represent a significant threat to system security, leveraging shared resources to clandestinely transmit information from highly secure systems, thereby violating the system's security policies. These attacks exploit…
We introduce a new timing side-channel attack on Intel CPU processors. Our Frontal attack exploits timing differences that arise from how the CPU frontend fetches and processes instructions while being interrupted. In particular, we observe…
Timing side-channels represent an insidious security challenge for cloud computing, because: (a) massive parallelism in the cloud makes timing channels pervasive and hard to control; (b) timing channels enable one customer to steal…
Modern processors are highly optimized systems where every single cycle of computation time matters. Many optimizations depend on the data that is being processed. Software-based microarchitectural attacks exploit effects of these…
Cryptographic research takes software timing side channels seriously. Approaches to mitigate them include constant-time coding and techniques to enforce such practices. However, recent attacks like Meltdown [42], Spectre [37], and…
Timing information leakage occurs whenever an attacker successfully deduces confidential internal information by observing some timed information such as events with timestamps. Timed automata are an extension of finite-state automata with…
The transient-execution attack Meltdown leaks sensitive information by transiently accessing inaccessible data during out-of-order execution. Although Meltdown is fixed in hardware for recent CPU generations, most currently-deployed CPUs…
Microarchitectural timing attacks exploit subtle timing variations caused by hardware behaviors to leak sensitive information. In this paper, we introduce MCHammer, a novel side-channel technique that leverages machine clears induced by…
In the last years, a series of side channels have been discovered on CPUs. These side channels have been used in powerful attacks, e.g., on cryptographic implementations, or as building blocks in transient-execution attacks such as Spectre…
Covert channels are communication channels used by attackers to transmit information from a compromised system when the access control policy of the system does not allow doing so. Previous work has shown that CPU frequency scaling can be…
Microarchitectural side channels expose unprotected software to information leakage attacks where a software adversary is able to track runtime behavior of a benign process and steal secrets such as cryptographic keys. As suggested by…
Transient execution attacks utilize micro-architectural covert channels to leak secrets that should not have been accessible during logical program execution. Commonly used micro-architectural covert channels are those that leave lasting…
Covert channel techniques are used by attackers to transfer data in a way prohibited by the security policy. There are two main categories of covert channels: timing channels and storage channels. This paper introduces a new storage channel…
Caches have been used to construct various types of covert and side channels to leak information. Most existing cache channels exploit the timing difference between cache hits and cache misses. However, we introduce a new and broader…
Operating Systems enforce logical isolation using abstractions such as processes, containers, and isolation technologies to protect a system from malicious or buggy code. In this paper, we show new types of side channels through the file…
A large number of crypto accelerators are being deployed with the widespread adoption of IoT. It is vitally important that these accelerators and other security hardware IPs are provably secure. Security is an extra functional requirement…