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Timing attacks are considered one of the most damaging side-channel attacks. These attacks exploit timing fluctuations caused by certain operations to disclose confidential information to an attacker. For instance, in asymmetric encryption,…
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…
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…
Side-channel attacks (SCAs), which infer secret information (for example secret keys) by exploiting information that leaks from the implementation (such as power consumption), have been shown to be a non-negligible threat to modern…
We present a new hardware-agnostic side-channel attack that targets one of the most fundamental software caches in modern computer systems: the operating system page cache. The page cache is a pure software cache that contains all…
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…
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…
Shared cache resources in multi-core processors are vulnerable to cache side-channel attacks. Recently proposed defenses have their own caveats: Randomization-based defenses are vulnerable to the evolving attack algorithms besides relying…
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…
Modern computer processors use microarchitectural optimization mechanisms to improve performance. As a downside, such optimizations are prone to introducing side-channel vulnerabilities. Speculative loading of memory, called prefetching, is…
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…
To meet the ever-growing need for performance in silicon devices, SoC providers have been increasingly relying on software-hardware cooperation. By controlling hardware resources such as power or clock management from the software,…
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…
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…
Side-channel attacks are a security exploit that take advantage of information leakage. They use measurement and analysis of physical parameters to reverse engineer and extract secrets from a system. Power analysis attacks in particular,…
In modern computing environments, hardware resources are commonly shared, and parallel computation is widely used. Parallel tasks can cause privacy and security problems if proper isolation is not enforced. Intel proposed SGX to create a…
This paper evaluates new security threats due to the processor frontend in modern Intel processors. The root causes of the security threats are the multiple paths in the processor frontend that the micro-operations can take: through the…
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…
Microarchitectural optimizations are expected to play a crucial role in ensuring performance scalability in future technology nodes. However, recent attacks have demonstrated that microarchitectural optimizations, which were assumed to be…
The Least-Recently Used cache replacement policy and its variants are widely deployed in modern processors. This paper shows for the first time in detail that the LRU states of caches can be used to leak information: any access to a cache…