Related papers: Speculose: Analyzing the Security Implications of …

Malicious software, or malware, presents a continuously evolving challenge in computer security. These embedded snippets of code in the form of malicious files or hidden within legitimate files cause a major risk to systems with their…

There is a long history of side channels in the memory hierarchy of modern CPUs. Especially the cache side channel is widely used in the context of transient execution attacks and covert channels. Therefore, many secure cache architectures…

The severity of recent vulnerabilities discovered on modern CPUs, e.g., Spectre [1], highlights how information leakage can have devas-tating effects to the security of computer systems. At the same time, it suggests that confidentiality…

Advancement of chip technology will make future computer chips faster. Power consumption of such chips shall also decrease. But this speed gain shall not come free of cost, there is going to be a trade-off between speed and efficiency, i.e…

In this work we present the Secure Machine, SeM for short, a CPU architecture extension for secure computing. SeM uses a small amount of in-chip additional hardware that monitors key communication channels inside the CPU chip, and only acts…

A function inlining optimization is a widely used transformation in modern compilers, which replaces a call site with the callee's body in need. While this transformation improves performance, it significantly impacts static features such…

High-confidence computing relies on trusted instructional set architecture, sealed kernels, and secure operating systems. Cloud computing depends on trusted systems for virtualization tasks. Branch predictions and pipelines are essential in…

High-performance dynamic language implementations make heavy use of speculative optimizations to achieve speeds close to statically compiled languages. These optimizations are typically performed by a just-in-time compiler that generates…

We present uSpectre, a new class of transient execution attacks that exploit microcode branch mispredictions to transiently leak sensitive data. We find that many long-known and recently-discovered transient execution attacks, which were…

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,…

Memory disclosure attacks play an important role in the exploitation of memory corruption vulnerabilities. By analyzing recent research, we observe that bypasses of defensive solutions that enforce control-flow integrity or attempt to…

Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) are the core control devices in Industrial Control Systems (ICSs), which control and monitor the underlying physical plants such as power grids. PLCs were initially designed to work in a trusted…

Recently, out-of-order execution, an important performance optimization in modern high-end processors, has been revealed to pose a significant security threat, allowing information leaks across security domains. In particular, the Meltdown…

This paper argues and shows that speculative vectorization, where a loop with rare or unknown memory dependencies are still vectorized, is fundamentally vulnerable and cannot be mitigated by existing defenses. We implement a simple proof of…

The latest Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are reported to reach up to 200 billion floating point operations per second (200 Gflops) and to have price performance of 0.1 cents per M flop. These facts raise great interest in the…

Approximate memory is a technique to mitigate the performance gap between memory subsystems and CPUs with its reduced access latency at a cost of data integrity. To gain benefit from approximate memory for realistic applications, it is…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed on converged Cloud and High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure. However, as LLMs handle confidential inputs and are fine-tuned on costly, proprietary datasets, their heightened…

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…

As multicore computing is now standard, it seems irresponsible for constraints researchers to ignore the implications of it. Researchers need to address a number of issues to exploit parallelism, such as: investigating which constraint…

Caches are used to reduce the speed differential between the CPU and memory to improve the performance of modern processors. However, attackers can use contention-based cache timing attacks to steal sensitive information from victim…