Related papers: MeltdownPrime and SpectrePrime: Automatically-Synt…

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…

The power grid is a critical infrastructure that plays a vital role in modern society. Its availability is of utmost importance, as a loss can endanger human lives. However, with the increasing digitalization of the power grid, it also…

Out-of-order speculation, a technique ubiquitous since the early 1990s, remains a fundamental security flaw. Via attacks such as Spectre and Meltdown, an attacker can trick a victim, in an otherwise entirely correct program, into leaking…

Logic locking has been a promising solution to many hardware security threats, such as intellectual property infringement and overproduction. Due to the increased attention that threats have received, many efficient specialized attacks…

Scalability issues may prevent users from verifying critical properties of a complex hardware design. In this situation, we propose to synthesize a "safety shield" that is attached to the design to enforce the properties at run time. Shield…

Vertical split learning (SL) enables collaborative model training across parties holding complementary features without sharing raw data, but recent work has shown that it is highly vulnerable to poisoning-based backdoor attacks operating…

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…

The power consumption of a microprocessor is a huge channel for information leakage. While the most popular exploitation of this channel is to recover cryptographic keys from embedded devices, other applications such as mobile app…

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…

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…

Microarchitectural attacks have become more threatening the hardware security than before with the increasing diversity of attacks such as Spectre and Meltdown. Vendor patches cannot keep up with the pace of the new threats, which makes the…

Continuous technology scaling and the introduction of advanced technology nodes in Integrated Circuit (IC) fabrication is constantly exposing new manufacturability issues. One such issue, stemming from complex interaction between design and…

Cache coherence protocols based on self-invalidation and self-downgrade have recently seen increased popularity due to their simplicity, potential performance efficiency, and low energy consumption. However, such protocols result in memory…

Over the past years, literature has shown that attacks exploiting the microarchitecture of modern processors pose a serious threat to the privacy of mobile phone users. This is because applications leave distinct footprints in the…

To avoid costly security patching after software deployment, security-by-design techniques (e.g., STRIDE threat analysis) are adopted in organizations to root out security issues before the system is ever implemented. Despite the global gap…

Transient execution attacks have been one of the widely explored microarchitectural side channels since the discovery of Spectre and Meltdown. However, much of the research has been driven by manual discovery of new transient paths through…

We propose a symbolic execution method for analyzing the safety of software under fault attacks both accurately and efficiently. Fault attacks leverage physically injected hardware faults in an embedded system to break the safety of a…

Micro-architectural attacks use information leaked through shared resources to break hardware-enforced isolation. These attacks have been used to steal private information ranging from cryptographic keys to privileged Operating System (OS)…

Modern machine learning increasingly requires training on a large collection of data from multiple sources, not all of which can be trusted. A particularly concerning scenario is when a small fraction of poisoned data changes the behavior…

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…