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Recent discovery of security attacks in advanced processors, known as Spectre and Meltdown, has resulted in high public alertness about security of hardware. The root cause of these attacks is information leakage across "covert channels"…
Performance Monitor Unit (PMU) is a significant hardware module on the current processors, which counts the events launched by processor into a set of PMU counters. Ideally, the events triggered by instructions that are executed but the…
Intel SGX and hypervisors isolate non-privileged programs from other software, ensuring confidentiality and integrity. However, side-channel attacks continue to threaten Intel SGX's security, enabling malicious OS to manipulate PTE present…
The ever increasing popularity and availability of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) had a stark influence on microarchitectural attack research in academia, as their strong attacker model both boosts existing attack vectors and…
Speculative execution enhances processor performance by predicting intermediate results and executing instructions based on these predictions. However, incorrect predictions can lead to security vulnerabilities, as speculative instructions…
Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) enables user-level code to create private memory regions called enclaves, whose code and data are protected by the CPU from software and hardware attacks outside the enclaves. Recent work introduces…
Network Function Virtualization (NFV) promises the benefits of reduced infrastructure, personnel, and management costs by outsourcing network middleboxes to the public or private cloud. Unfortunately, running network functions in the cloud…
Integrity is critical for maintaining system security, as it ensures that only genuine software is loaded onto a machine. Although confidential virtual machines (CVMs) function within isolated environments separate from the host, it is…
Trusted execution environments like Intel SGX provide \emph{enclaves}, which offer strong security guarantees for applications. Running entire applications inside enclaves is possible, but this approach leads to a large trusted computing…
Enclaves have emerged as a particularly compelling primitive to implement trusted execution environments: strongly isolated sensitive user-mode processes in a largely untrusted software environment. While the threat models employed by…
Hardware-enclaves that target complex CPU designs compromise both security and performance. Programs have little control over micro-architecture, which leads to side-channel leaks, and then have to be transformed to have worst-case control-…
Self-modifying code (SMC) allows programs to alter their own instructions, optimizing performance and functionality on x86 processors. Despite its benefits, SMC introduces unique microarchitectural behaviors that can be exploited for…
Adversaries with physical access to a target platform can perform cold boot or DMA attacks to extract sensitive data from the RAM. In response, several main-memory encryption schemes have been proposed to prevent such attacks. Also hardware…
We provide an evaluation of an analytical workload in a confidential computing environment, combining DuckDB with two technologies: modular columnar encryption in Parquet files (data at rest) and the newest version of the Intel SGX Trusted…
Trusted Execution Environments, such as Intel SGX, use hardware supports to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of applications against a compromised cloud system. However, side channels like access patterns remain for adversaries to…
CPU cache is a limited but crucial storage component in modern processors, whereas the cache timing side-channel may inadvertently leak information through the physically measurable timing variance. Speculative execution, an essential…
Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) local and remote attestation mechanisms enable an enclave to attest its identity (i.e., the enclave measurement, which is the cryptographic hash of its initial code and data) to an enclave. To verify…
Recent attacks have broken process isolation by exploiting microarchitectural side channels that allow indirect access to shared microarchitectural state. Enclaves strengthen the process abstraction to restore isolation guarantees. We…
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…
The widening availability of hardware-based trusted execution environments (TEEs) has been accelerating the adaptation of new applications using TEEs. Recent studies showed that a cloud application consists of multiple distributed software…