Related papers: MeltdownPrime and SpectrePrime: Automatically-Synt…

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…

Spectre vulnerabilities violate our fundamental assumptions about architectural abstractions, allowing attackers to steal sensitive data despite previously state-of-the-art countermeasures. To defend against Spectre, developers of…

Trusted Platform Module (TPM) serves as a hardware-based root of trust that protects cryptographic keys from privileged system and physical adversaries. In this work, we perform a black-box timing analysis of TPM 2.0 devices deployed on…

In early 2018, Meltdown first showed how to read arbitrary kernel memory from user space by exploiting side-effects from transient instructions. While this attack has been mitigated through stronger isolation boundaries between user and…

Recent security vulnerabilities that target speculative execution (e.g., Spectre) present a significant challenge for processor design. The highly publicized vulnerability uses speculative execution to learn victim secrets by changing cache…

Additive manufacturing (AM) is rapidly integrating into critical sectors such as aerospace, automotive, and healthcare. However, this cyber-physical convergence introduces new attack surfaces, especially at the interface between…

The security of computer systems fundamentally relies on memory isolation, e.g., kernel address ranges are marked as non-accessible and are protected from user access. In this paper, we present Meltdown. Meltdown exploits side effects of…

Eliminating vulnerabilities from low-level code is vital for securing software. Static analysis is a promising approach for discovering vulnerabilities since it can provide developers early feedback on the code they write. But, it presents…

Speculation is key to achieving high CPU performance, yet it enables risks like Spectre attacks which remain a significant challenge to mitigate without incurring substantial performance overheads. These attacks typically unfold in three…

We address the safety verification and synthesis problems for real-time systems. We introduce real-time programs that are made of instructions that can perform assignments to discrete and real-valued variables. They are general enough to…

In the evolving landscape of integrated circuit (IC) design, the increasing complexity of modern processors and intellectual property (IP) cores has introduced new challenges in ensuring design correctness and security. The recent…

Penetration Testing is a methodology for assessing network security, by generating and executing possible attacks. Doing so automatically allows for regular and systematic testing. A key question then is how to automatically generate the…

Side-channel attacks such as Spectre that utilize speculative execution to steal application secrets pose a significant threat to modern computing systems. While program transformations can mitigate some Spectre attacks, more advanced…

In this paper, we propose a tool, called DataProVe, for specifying high-level data protection policies and system architectures, as well as verifying the conformance between them in a fully automated way. The syntax of the policies and the…

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…

Despite advances in improving large language model (LLM) to refuse to answer malicious instructions, widely used LLMs remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks where attackers generate instructions with distributions differing from safety…

Deep learning-based malware detection systems are vulnerable to adversarial EXEmples - carefully-crafted malicious programs that evade detection with minimal perturbation. As such, the community is dedicating effort to develop mechanisms to…

Hardware caches are essential performance optimization features in modern processors to reduce the effective memory access time. Unfortunately, they are also the prime targets for attacks on computer processors because they are…

In the last 10 years, cache attacks on Intel x86 CPUs have gained increasing attention among the scientific community and powerful techniques to exploit cache side channels have been developed. However, modern smartphones use one or more…

We propose a novel type system for verifying that programs correctly implement constant-resource behavior. Our type system extends recent work on automatic amortized resource analysis (AARA), a set of techniques that automatically derive…