Related papers: Software Grand Exposure: SGX Cache Attacks Are Pra…
Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) allow user processes to create enclaves that protect security-sensitive computation against access from the OS kernel and the hypervisor. Recent work has shown that TEEs are vulnerable to side-channel…
Speculation is key to achieving high CPU performance, yet it enables risks like Spectre attacks which remain a significant challenge to mitigate without incurring substantial performance overheads. These attacks typically unfold in three…
Over the past few years, deep learning has been getting progressively more popular for the exploitation of side-channel vulnerabilities in embedded cryptographic applications, as it offers advantages in terms of the amount of attack traces…
Mitigating memory-access attacks on the Intel SGX architecture is an important and open research problem. A natural notion of the mitigation is cache-miss obliviousness which requires the cache-misses emitted during an enclave execution are…
Novel confidential computing technologies such as Intel TDX, AMD SEV, and Arm CCA have recently emerged. In practice, due to its minimal trust boundaries, Intel SGX still remains widely used for enclave-based applications in cloud…
In the recent past, we have witnessed the shift towards attacks on the microarchitectural CPU level. In particular, cache side-channels play a predominant role as they allow an attacker to exfiltrate secret information by exploiting the CPU…
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…
This paper proposes a system, entitled Concealer that allows sharing time-varying spatial data (e.g., as produced by sensors) in encrypted form to an untrusted third-party service provider to provide location-based applications (involving…
Side-channel attacks have become a severe threat to the confidentiality of computer applications and systems. One popular type of such attacks is the microarchitectural attack, where the adversary exploits the hardware features to break the…
Searchable Symmetric Encryption (SSE) enables efficient search capabilities over encrypted data, allowing users to maintain privacy while utilizing cloud storage. However, SSE schemes are vulnerable to leakage attacks that exploit access…
Contact tracing is paramount to fighting the pandemic but it comes with legitimate privacy concerns. This paper proposes a system enabling both, contact tracing and data privacy. We propose the use of the Intel SGX trusted execution…
A large amount of transaction data containing associations between individuals and sensitive information flows everyday into data stores. Examples include web queries, credit card transactions, medical exam records, transit database…
Side-channel analysis (SCA) poses a real-world threat by exploiting unintentional physical signals to extract secret information from secure devices. Evaluation labs also use the same techniques to certify device security. In recent years,…
Dynamic searchable symmetric encryption (DSSE) enables a server to efficiently search and update over encrypted files. To minimize the leakage during updates, a security notion named forward and backward privacy is expected for newly…
Encrypting data before sending it to the cloud protects it against hackers and malicious insiders, but requires the cloud to compute on encrypted data. Trusted (hardware) modules, e.g., secure enclaves like Intel's SGX, can very efficiently…
Advancements in battery technology have accelerated the adoption of Electric Vehicles (EVs) due to their environmental benefits. However, their growing sophistication introduces security and privacy challenges. Often seen as mere…
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…
Cryptography is vital for data security, but cryptographic algorithms can still be vulnerable to side-channel attacks (SCAs), physical assaults exploiting power consumption and EM radiation. SCAs pose a significant threat to cryptographic…
Timing channels in cache hierarchies are an important enabler in many microarchitectural attacks. ScatterCache (USENIX 2019) is a protected cache architecture that randomizes the address-to-index mapping with a keyed cryptographic function,…
In the main text published at USENIX Security 2025, we presented a systematic analysis of the role of cache occupancy in the design considerations for randomized caches (from the perspectives of performance and security). On the performance…