Related papers: Adversarial Symbolic Execution for Detecting Concu…
Modern computer processors use microarchitectural optimization mechanisms to improve performance. As a downside, such optimizations are prone to introducing side-channel vulnerabilities. Speculative loading of memory, called prefetching, is…
Memory-safety issues and information leakage are known to be depressingly common. We consider the compositional static detection of these kinds of vulnerabilities in first-order C-like programs. Indeed the latter are relational hyper-safety…
Side-channel attacks on memory (SCAM) exploit unintended data leaks from memory subsystems to infer sensitive information, posing significant threats to system security. These attacks exploit vulnerabilities in memory access patterns, cache…
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…
Attacks like Spectre abuse speculative execution, one of the key performance optimizations of modern CPUs. Recently, several testing tools have emerged to automatically detect speculative leaks in commercial (black-box) CPUs. However, the…
Microarchitectural side channels expose unprotected software to information leakage attacks where a software adversary is able to track runtime behavior of a benign process and steal secrets such as cryptographic keys. As suggested by…
The Least-Recently Used cache replacement policy and its variants are widely deployed in modern processors. This paper shows for the first time in detail that the LRU states of caches can be used to leak information: any access to a cache…
CPU caches introduce variations into the execution time of programs that can be exploited by adversaries to recover private information about users or cryptographic keys. Establishing the security of countermeasures against this threat…
We present an automatic analysis technique for checking data races on OpenCL kernels. Our method defines symbolic execution techniques based on separation logic with suitable abstractions to automatically detect non-benign racy behaviours…
Prompt caching in large language models (LLMs) results in data-dependent timing variations: cached prompts are processed faster than non-cached prompts. These timing differences introduce the risk of side-channel timing attacks. For…
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…
Symbolic Execution is a formal method that can be used to verify the behavior of computer programs and detect software vulnerabilities. Compared to other testing methods such as fuzzing, Symbolic Execution has the advantage of providing…
Timing side channels have been used to extract cryptographic keys and sensitive documents, even from trusted enclaves. In this paper, we focus on cache side channels created by access to shared code or data in the memory hierarchy. This…
Supervised deep learning has emerged as an effective tool for carrying out power side-channel attacks on cryptographic implementations. While increasingly-powerful deep learning-based attacks are regularly published, comparatively-little…
The transient-execution attack Meltdown leaks sensitive information by transiently accessing inaccessible data during out-of-order execution. Although Meltdown is fixed in hardware for recent CPU generations, most currently-deployed CPUs…
Spectre attacks exploit speculative execution to leak sensitive information. In the last few years, a number of static side-channel detectors have been proposed to detect cache leakage in the presence of speculative execution. However,…
Time variation during program execution can leak sensitive information. Time variations due to program control flow and hardware resource contention have been used to steal encryption keys in cipher implementations such as AES and RSA. A…
CPUs provide isolation mechanisms like virtualization and privilege levels to protect software. Yet these focus on architectural isolation while typically overlooking microarchitectural side channels, exemplified by Meltdown and Foreshadow.…
We introduce a new timing side-channel attack on Intel CPU processors. Our Frontal attack exploits timing differences that arise from how the CPU frontend fetches and processes instructions while being interrupted. In particular, we observe…
Power-based side-channel is a serious security threat to the System on Chip (SoC). The secret information is leaked from the power profile of the system while a cryptographic algorithm is running. The mitigation requires efforts from both…