Related papers: Your Processor Leaks Information - and There's Not…
Realizing flow security in a concurrent environment is extremely challenging, primarily due to non-deterministic nature of execution. The difficulty is further exacerbated from a security angle if sequential threads disclose control…
A Covert Channel (CC) exploits legitimate communication mechanisms to stealthily transmit information, often bypassing traditional security controls. Among these, a novel paradigm called History Covert Channels (HCC) leverages past network…
Ion channels are proteins with a hole down the middle embedded in cell membranes. Membranes form insulating structures and the channels through them allow and control the movement of charged particles, spherical ions, mostly Na+, K+, Ca++,…
Micro-architectural attacks use information leaked through shared resources to break hardware-enforced isolation. These attacks have been used to steal private information ranging from cryptographic keys to privileged Operating System (OS)…
Compression algorithms are widely used as they save memory without losing data. However, elimination of redundant symbols and sequences in data leads to a compression side channel. So far, compression attacks have only focused on the…
Fault injection attacks represent a class of threats that can compromise embedded systems across multiple layers of abstraction, such as system software, instruction set architecture (ISA), microarchitecture, and physical implementation.…
Developers rely on constant-time programming to prevent timing side-channel attacks. But these efforts can be undone by compilers, whose optimizations may silently reintroduce leaks. While recent works have measured the extent of such…
Flushing the cache, using instructions like clflush and wbinvd, is commonly proposed as a countermeasure against access-based cache attacks. In this report, we show that several Intel caches, specifically the L1 caches in some pre-Skylake…
The Lightning Network (LN) is a second-layer protocol for Bitcoin designed to enable fast and cost-efficient off-chain transactions. Channels in the LN can be closed either by mutual agreement or unilaterally through a forced closure, which…
Prompt caching in large language models (LLMs) results in data-dependent timing variations: cached prompts are processed faster than non-cached prompts. These timing differences introduce the risk of side-channel timing attacks. For…
In this work, we study information leakage in timing side channels that arise in the context of shared event schedulers. Consider two processes, one of them an innocuous process (referred to as Alice) and the other a malicious one (referred…
Side-channel attacks on memory (SCAM) exploit unintended data leaks from memory subsystems to infer sensitive information, posing significant threats to system security. These attacks exploit vulnerabilities in memory access patterns, cache…
Phase clocks are synchronization tools that implement a form of logical time in distributed systems. For systems tolerating transient faults by self-repair of damaged data, phase clocks can enable reasoning about the progress of distributed…
Recent transient-execution attacks, such as RIDL, Fallout, and ZombieLoad, demonstrated that attackers can leak information while it transits through microarchitectural buffers. Named Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) by Intel, these…
Microcode is an abstraction layer used by modern x86 processors that interprets user-visible CISC instructions to hardware-internal RISC instructions. The capability to update x86 microcode enables a vendor to modify CPU behavior in-field,…
Discovering new vulnerabilities and implementing security and privacy measures are important to protect systems and data against physical attacks. One such vulnerability is impedance, an inherent property of a device that can be exploited…
Power side-channel attacks are a very effective cryptanalysis technique that can infer secret keys of security ICs by monitoring the power consumption. Since the emergence of practical attacks in the late 90s, they have been a major threat…
Percolation is a concept widely used in many fields of research and refers to the propagation of substances through porous media (e.g., coffee filtering), or the behaviour of complex networks (e.g., spreading of diseases). Percolation…
Many physical systems considered promising qubit candidates are not, in fact, two-level systems. Such systems can leak out of the preferred computational states, leading to errors on any qubits that interact with leaked qubits. Without…
Recent research shows that colluded malware in different VMs sharing a single physical host may use a resource as a channel to leak critical information. Covert channels employ time or storage characteristics to transmit confidential…