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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"…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-12-13 Mohammad Rahmani Fadiheh , Dominik Stoffel , Clark Barrett , Subhasish Mitra , Wolfgang Kunz

Speculative execution is crucial in enhancing modern processor performance but can introduce Spectre-type vulnerabilities that may leak sensitive information. Detecting Spectre gadgets from programs has been a research focus to enhance the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Fangzheng Lin , Zhongfa Wang , Hiroshi Sasaki

The increasing sophistication of modern cyber threats, particularly file-less malware relying on living-off-the-land techniques, poses significant challenges to traditional detection mechanisms. Memory forensics has emerged as a crucial…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Arslan Tariq Syed , Mohamed Chahine Ghanem , Elhadj Benkhelifa , Fauzia Idrees Abro

The Spectre speculative side-channel attacks pose formidable threats for security. Research has shown that code following the cryptographic constant-time discipline can be efficiently protected against Spectre v1 using a selective variant…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Jonathan Baumann , Roberto Blanco , Léon Ducruet , Sebastian Harwig , Catalin Hritcu

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-04-11 Sunjay Cauligi , Craig Disselkoen , Daniel Moghimi , Gilles Barthe , Deian Stefan

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Ivan Puddu , Moritz Schneider , Miro Haller , Srdjan Čapkun

This paper introduces Triosecuris, a formally verified defense against Spectre BTB, RSB, and PHT that combines CET-style hardware-assisted control-flow integrity with compiler-inserted speculative load hardening (SLH). Triosecuris is based…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Jonathan Baumann , Yonghyun Kim , Yan Farba , Catalin Hritcu , Julay Leatherman-Brooks

Speculative vulnerabilities such as Spectre and Meltdown expose speculative execution state that can be exploited to leak information across security domains via side-channels. Such vulnerabilities often stay undetected for a long time as…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-02-09 Oleksii Oleksenko , Christof Fetzer , Boris Köpf , Mark Silberstein

Cache side channel attacks are increasingly alarming in modern processors due to the recent emergence of Spectre and Meltdown attacks. A typical attack performs intentional cache access and manipulates cache states to leak secrets by…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2024-05-16 Luyi Li , Jiayi Huang , Lang Feng , Zhongfeng Wang

Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) is a typical attack technique that exploits return addresses to abuse existing code repeatedly. Most of the current return address protecting mechanisms (also known as the Backward-Edge Control-Flow…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Jinfeng Li , Liwei Chen , Qizhen Xu , Linan Tian , Gang Shi , Kai Chen , Dan Meng

Transient Execution Attacks (TEAs) have gradually become a major security threat to modern high-performance processors. They exploit the vulnerability of speculative execution to illegally access private data, and transmit them through…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-04-18 Bowen Tang , Chenggang Wu , Pen-Chung Yew , Yinqian Zhang , Mengyao Xie , Yuanming Lai , Yan Kang , Wei Wang , Qiang Wei , Zhe Wang

With the exponential rise in the use of cloud services, smart devices, and IoT devices, advanced cyber attacks have become increasingly sophisticated and ubiquitous. Furthermore, the rapid evolution of computing architectures and memory…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Jyotiprakash Mishra , Sanjay K. Sahay

The recent Meltdown and Spectre attacks highlight the importance of automated verification techniques for identifying hardware security vulnerabilities. We have developed a tool for synthesizing microarchitecture-specific programs capable…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-02-13 Caroline Trippel , Daniel Lustig , Margaret Martonosi

The efficacy of address space layout randomization has been formally demonstrated in a shared-memory model by Abadi et al., contingent on specific assumptions about victim programs. However, modern operating systems, implementing layout…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-04-14 Davide Davoli , Martin Avanzini , Tamara Rezk

Attackers can access sensitive information of programs by exploiting the side-effects of speculatively-executed instructions using Spectre attacks. To mitigate theses attacks, popular compilers deployed a wide range of countermeasures. The…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2021-09-13 Marco Patrignani , Marco Guarnieri

Detecting vulnerabilities in software is a critical challenge in the development and deployment of applications. One of the most known and dangerous vulnerabilities is stack-based buffer overflows, which may allow potential attackers to…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-01-01 William Arild Dahl , Laszlo Erdodi , Fabio Massimo Zennaro

Since the advent of Spectre attacks, researchers and practitioners have developed a range of hardware and software measures to counter transient execution attacks. A prime example of such mitigation is speculative load hardening in LLVM,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-12-18 Tiziano Marinaro , Pablo Buiras , Andreas Lindner , Roberto Guanciale , Hamed Nemati

LLM serving platforms are increasingly deployed as multi-model cloud systems, where user demand is often long-tailed: a few popular large models receive most requests, while many smaller tail models remain underutilized. We propose…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Jincheng Xie , Yawen Ling , Qi Xiao , Feiyu Zhang , Zhongyi Huang , Wen Hu , Yu Zheng

Spectre v1 information disclosure attacks, which exploit CPU conditional branch misprediction, remain unsolved in deployed software. Certain Spectre v1 gadgets can be exploited only by out-of-place mistraining, in which the attacker…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Adam Tuby , Adam Morrison

Transient execution side-channel attacks, such as Spectre, have been shown to break almost all isolation primitives. We introduce a new security property we call relaxed microarchitectural isolation (RMI) that allows sensitive programs that…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Jules Drean , Miguel Gomez-Garcia , Fisher Jepsen , Thomas Bourgeat , Srinivas Devadas