Related papers: Did we learn from LLC Side Channel Attacks? A Cach…

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…

Modern computer architectures rely on caches to reduce the latency gap between the CPU and main memory. While indispensable for performance, caches pose a serious threat to security because they leak information about memory access patterns…

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…

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…

Timing side-channel attacks exploit secret-dependent execution time to fully or partially recover secrets of cryptographic implementations, posing a severe threat to software security. Constant-time programming discipline is an effective…

Substring-searchable symmetric encryption (substring-SSE) has become increasingly critical for privacy-preserving applications in cloud systems. However, existing schemes remain vulnerable to information leakage during search operations,…

Caches on the modern commodity CPUs have become one of the major sources of side-channel leakages and been abused as a new attack vector. To thwart the cache-based side-channel attacks, two types of countermeasures have been proposed:…

We investigate the role of artificial intelligence in cybersecurity by evaluating how machine learning techniques can detect malicious network activity and identify potential information leakage in cryptographic implementations. We conduct…

New hardware primitives such as Intel SGX secure a user-level process in presence of an untrusted or compromised OS. Such "enclaved execution" systems are vulnerable to several side-channels, one of which is the page fault channel. In this…

Measuring the information leakage is critical for evaluating the practical security of cryptographic devices against side-channel analysis. Information-theoretic measures can be used (along with Fano's inequality) to derive upper bounds on…

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…

Cache template attacks demonstrated automated leakage of user input in shared libraries. However, for large binaries, the runtime is prohibitively high. Other automated approaches focused on cryptographic implementations and media software…

We present a software approach to mitigate access-driven side-channel attacks that leverage last-level caches (LLCs) shared across cores to leak information between security domains (e.g., tenants in a cloud). Our approach dynamically…

The widespread adoption of TLS 1.3 and QUIC has rendered payload content invisible, shifting traffic analysis toward side-channel features. However, rigorous justification for why side-channel leakage is inevitable in encrypted…

Recent Searchable Symmetric Encryption (SSE) schemes enable secure searching over an encrypted database stored in a server while limiting the information leaked to the server. These schemes focus on hiding the access pattern, which refers…

While side-channel leakage is traditionally evaluated from a fabricated chip, it is more time-efficient and cost-effective to do so during the design phase of the chip. We present a methodology to rank the gates of a design according to…

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…

Leakage contracts have recently been proposed as a new security abstraction at the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) level. Such contracts aim to faithfully capture the information processors may leak through side effects of their…

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…

Recent work on Side Channel Analysis (SCA) targets old, well-known vulnerabilities, even previously exploited, reported, and patched in high-profile cryptography libraries. Nevertheless, researchers continue to find and exploit the same…