Related papers: Software-based Microarchitectural Attacks

Timing-based side and covert channels in processor caches continue to be a threat to modern computers. This work shows for the first time a systematic, large-scale analysis of Arm devices and the detailed results of attacks the processors…

The recent Spectre attacks has demonstrated the fundamental insecurity of current computer microarchitecture. The attacks use features like pipelining, out-of-order and speculation to extract arbitrary information about the memory contents…

Computer systems often provide hardware support for isolation mechanisms like privilege levels, virtual memory, or enclaved execution. Over the past years, several successful software-based side-channel attacks have been developed that…

The microservice software architecture leverages the idea of splitting large monolithic applications into multiple smaller services that interact using lightweight communication schemes. While the microservice architecture has proven its…

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…

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…

Embedded software is developed under the assumption that hardware execution is always correct. Fault attacks break and exploit that assumption. Through the careful introduction of targeted faults, an adversary modifies the control-flow or…

Timing and cache side channels provide powerful attacks against many sensitive operations including cryptographic implementations. Existing defenses cannot protect against all classes of such attacks without incurring prohibitive…

Multi-process concurrency is effective in improving program efficiency and maximizing CPU utilization. The correct execution of concurrency is ensured by the mutual exclusion and synchronization mechanism (MESM) that manages the shared…

Meltdown and Spectre exploit microarchitectural changes the CPU makes during transient out-of-order execution. Using side-channel techniques, these attacks enable leaking arbitrary data from memory. As state-of-the-art software mitigations…

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…

Microarchitectural timing side channels have been thoroughly investigated as a security threat in hardware designs featuring shared buffers (e.g., caches) or parallelism between attacker and victim task execution. However, contradicting…

Timing channels are information flows, encoded in the relative timing of events, that bypass the system's protection mechanisms. Any microarchitectural state that depends on execution history and affects the rate of progress of later…

Intel SGX is known to be vulnerable to a class of practical attacks exploiting memory access pattern side-channels, notably page-fault attacks and cache timing attacks. A promising hardening scheme is to wrap applications in hardware…

Microarchitectural timing attacks are a type of information leakage attack, which exploit the time-shared microarchitectural components, such as caches, translation look-aside buffers (TLBs), branch prediction unit (BPU), and speculative…

Microarchitectural timing channels are a major threat to computer security. A set of OS mechanisms called time protection was recently proposed as a principled way of preventing information leakage through such channels and prototyped in…

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,…

Microarchitectural side channel attacks have been very prominent in security research over the last few years. Caches have been an outstanding covert channel, as they provide high resolution and generic cross-core leakage even with simple…

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…

Microarchitectural attacks exploit the abstraction gap between the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) and how instructions are actually executed by processors to compromise the confidentiality and integrity of a system. To secure systems…