Related papers: Your Processor Leaks Information - and There's Not…
Time variation during program execution can leak sensitive information. Time variations due to program control flow and hardware resource contention have been used to steal encryption keys in cipher implementations such as AES and RSA. A…
Modern processors dynamically control their operating frequency to optimize resource utilization, maximize energy savings, and conform to system-defined constraints. If, during the execution of a software workload, the running average of…
The code generation modules inside modern compilers such as GCC and LLVM, which use a limited number of CPU registers to store a large number of program variables, may introduce side-channel leaks even in software equipped with…
Recent discovery of security attacks in advanced processors, known as Spectre and Meltdown, has resulted in high public alertness about security of hardware. The root cause of these attacks is information leakage across "covert channels"…
With the recent advancements in machine learning theory, many commercial embedded micro-processors use neural network models for a variety of signal processing applications. However, their associated side-channel security vulnerabilities…
Modern x86 processors have many prefetch instructions that can be used by programmers to boost performance. However, these instructions may also cause security problems. In particular, we found that on Intel processors, there are two…
Covert channels can be utilized to secretly deliver information from high privileged processes to low privileged processes in the context of a high-assurance computing system. In this case study, we investigate the possibility of covert…
Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are integrated circuits that implement reconfigurable hardware. They are used in modern systems, creating specialized, highly-optimized integrated circuits without the need to design and manufacture…
The power consumption of a microprocessor is a huge channel for information leakage. While the most popular exploitation of this channel is to recover cryptographic keys from embedded devices, other applications such as mobile app…
Although cryptographic algorithms may be mathematically secure, it is often possible to leak secret information from the implementation of the algorithms. Timing and power side-channel vulnerabilities are some of the most widely considered…
The timing characteristics of cache, a high-speed storage between the fast CPU and the slowmemory, may reveal sensitive information of a program, thus allowing an adversary to conduct side-channel attacks. Existing methods for detecting…
Modern processors use branch prediction and speculative execution to maximize performance. For example, if the destination of a branch depends on a memory value that is in the process of being read, CPUs will try guess the destination and…
A processor's memory hierarchy has a major impact on the performance of running code. However, computing platforms, where the actual hardware characteristics are hidden from both the end user and the tools that mediate execution, such as a…
Timing-based side or covert channels in processor caches continue to present a threat to computer systems, and they are the key to many of the recent Spectre and Meltdown attacks. Based on improvements to an existing three-step model for…
The wide deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) has given rise to strong demands for optimizing their inference performance. Today's techniques serving this purpose primarily focus on reducing latency and improving throughput through…
Information leakage can have dramatic consequences on systems security. Among harmful information leaks, the timing information leakage occurs whenever an attacker successfully deduces confidential internal information. In this work, we…
A network covert channel is created that operates by modulating the time between web resource accesses, with an 'average web user' read-time used as a reference. While the covert channel may be classified as timing based, it does not…
We demonstrate the presence of a novel scheduler side-channel in preemptive, fixed-priority real-time systems (RTS); examples of such systems can be found in automotive systems, avionic systems, power plants and industrial control systems…
We present a taxonomy and an algebra for attack patterns on component-based operating systems. In a multilevel security scenario, where isolation of partitions containing data at different security classifications is the primary security…
In the last two decades, the evolving cyber-threat landscape has brought to center stage the contentious tradeoffs between the security and performance of modern microprocessors. The guarantees provided by the hardware to ensure no…