Related papers: Software-based Microarchitectural Attacks
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…
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…
Side-channel attacks have become prominent attack surfaces in cyberspace. Attackers use the side information generated by the system while performing a task. Among the various side-channel attacks, cache side-channel attacks are leading as…
Recent work has shown that out-of-order and speculative execution mechanisms used to increase performance in the majority of processors expose the processors to critical attacks. These attacks, called Meltdown and Spectre, exploit the side…
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…
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…
Side-channel attacks on microprocessors, like the RISC-V, exhibit security vulnerabilities that lead to several design challenges. Hence, it is imperative to study and analyze these security vulnerabilities comprehensively. In this paper,…
CPUs provide isolation mechanisms like virtualization and privilege levels to protect software. Yet these focus on architectural isolation while typically overlooking microarchitectural side channels, exemplified by Meltdown and Foreshadow.…
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…
Spectre intrusions exploit speculative execution design vulnerabilities in modern processors. The attacks violate the principles of isolation in programs to gain unauthorized private user information. Current state-of-the-art detection…
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…
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…
We present the first micro-architectural side-channel attack which runs entirely in the browser. In contrast to other works in this genre, this attack does not require the attacker to install any software on the victim's machine -- to…
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…
Side-channel attacks impose a serious threat to cryptographic algorithms, including widely employed ones, such as AES and RSA. These attacks take advantage of the algorithm implementation in hardware or software to extract secret…
The recent discovery of the Spectre and Meltdown attacks represents a watershed moment not just for the field of Computer Security, but also of Programming Languages. This paper explores speculative side-channel attacks and their…
With the exponential rise in the use of cloud services, smart devices, and IoT devices, advanced cyber attacks have become increasingly sophisticated and ubiquitous. Furthermore, the rapid evolution of computing architectures and memory…
How will future microarchitectures impact the security of existing cryptographic implementations? As we cannot keep reducing the size of transistors, chip vendors have started developing new microarchitectural optimizations to speed up…
The complexity of modern processor architectures has given rise to sophisticated interactions among their components. Such interactions may result in potential attack vectors in terms of side channels, possibly available to user-land…
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…