Related papers: Software-based Microarchitectural Attacks
Cache randomization has recently been revived as a promising defense against conflict-based cache side-channel attacks. As two of the latest implementations, CEASER-S and ScatterCache both claim to thwart conflict-based cache side-channel…
Power side-channel (PSC) attacks are widely used in embedded microcontrollers, particularly in cryptographic applications, to extract sensitive information. However, expanding the applications of PSC attacks to broader security contexts in…
Understanding micro-architectural behavior is profound in efficiently using hardware resources. Recent work has shown that, despite being aggressively optimized for modern hardware, in-memory online transaction processing (OLTP) systems…
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,…
New speculation-based attacks that affect large numbers of modern systems are disclosed regularly. Currently, CPU vendors regularly fall back to heavy-handed mitigations like using barriers or enforcing strict programming guidelines…
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…
Microarchitectural timing channels exploit information leakage between security domains that should be isolated, bypassing the operating system's security boundaries. These channels result from contention for shared microarchitectural…
CPU caches introduce variations into the execution time of programs that can be exploited by adversaries to recover private information about users or cryptographic keys. Establishing the security of countermeasures against this threat…
Modern microarchitectures incorporate optimization techniques such as speculative loads and store forwarding to improve the memory bottleneck. The processor executes the load speculatively before the stores, and forwards the data of a…
The vulnerability of machine learning systems to adversarial attacks questions their usage in many applications. In this paper, we propose a randomized diversification as a defense strategy. We introduce a multi-channel architecture in a…
Context. Service-oriented architecture and its microservice-based approach increase an attack surface of applications. Exposed microservices become a pivot point for advanced persistent threats and completely change the threat landscape.…
In the quest for efficiency and performance, edge-computing providers eliminate isolation boundaries between tenants, such as strict process isolation, and instead let them compute in a more lightweight multi-threaded single-process design.…
Micro-controller units (MCUs) implement the de facto interface between the physical and digital worlds. As a consequence, they appear in a variety of sensing/actuation applications, from smart personal spaces to complex industrial control…
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…
Architectural backdoors pose an under-examined but critical threat to deep neural networks, embedding malicious logic directly into a model's computational graph. Unlike traditional data poisoning or parameter manipulation, architectural…
Side-channel attacks that leak sensitive information through a computing device's interaction with its physical environment have proven to be a severe threat to devices' security, particularly when adversaries have unfettered physical…
We demonstrate that the format in which private keys are persisted impacts Side Channel Analysis (SCA) security. Surveying several widely deployed software libraries, we investigate the formats they support, how they parse these keys, and…
Modern applications process massive data volumes that overwhelm the storage and retrieval capabilities of memory systems, making memory the primary performance and energy-efficiency bottleneck of computing systems. Although many…
Side-channel attacks on shared hardware resources increasingly threaten confidentiality, especially with the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs). In this work, we introduce Spill The Beans, a novel application of cache side-channels to…
There is a growing need for hardware-software contracts which precisely define the implications of microarchitecture on software security-i.e., security contracts. It is our view that such contracts should explicitly account for…