Related papers: Time Protection: the Missing OS Abstraction
Cloud computing provides an effective business model for the deployment of IT infrastructure, platform, and software services. Often, facilities are outsourced to cloud providers and this offers the service consumer virtualization…
Timing side-channel attacks exploit secret-dependent execution time to fully or partially recover secrets of cryptographic implementations, posing a severe threat to software security. Constant-time programming discipline is an effective…
The Precision Time Protocol (PTP), standardized as IEEE 1588, provides sub-microsecond synchronization across distributed systems and underpins critical infrastructure in telecommunications, finance, power systems, and industrial…
The constant-time discipline is a software-based countermeasure used for protecting high assurance cryptographic implementations against timing side-channel attacks. Constant-time is effective (it protects against many known attacks),…
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"…
Microcontroller-based IoT devices often use embedded real-time operating systems (RTOSs). Vulnerabilities in these embedded RTOSs can lead to compromises of those IoT devices. Despite the significance of security protections, the absence of…
Many safety-critical systems require timely processing of sensor inputs to avoid potential safety hazards. Additionally, to support useful application features, such systems increasingly have a large rich operating system (OS) at the cost…
Almost all modern hardware, from phone SoCs to high-end servers with accelerators, contain memory translation and protection hardware like IOMMUs, firewalls, and lookup tables which make it impossible to reason about, and enforce protection…
Recent work has shown that out-of-order and speculative execution mechanisms used to increase performance in the majority of processors expose the processors to critical attacks. These attacks, called Meltdown and Spectre, exploit the side…
Power side-channel attacks are a very effective cryptanalysis technique that can infer secret keys of security ICs by monitoring the power consumption. Since the emergence of practical attacks in the late 90s, they have been a major threat…
Reliable on-off control of peripherals on smart devices is a key to security and privacy in many scenarios. Journalists want to reliably turn off radios to protect their sources during investigative reporting. Users wish to ensure cameras…
A one-time pad (OTP) based cipher to insure both data protection and integrity when mobile code arrives to a remote host is presented. Data protection is required when a mobile agent could retrieve confidential information that would be…
Investigating network covert channels in smartphones has become increasingly important as smartphones have recently replaced the role of traditional computers. Smartphones are subject to traditional computer network covert channel…
Virtualization plays an essential role in providing security to computational systems by isolating execution environments. Many software solutions, called hypervisors, have been proposed to provide virtualization capabilities. However, only…
The critical role that Network Time Protocol (NTP) plays in the Internet led to multiple efforts to secure it against time-shifting attacks. A recent proposal for enhancing the security of NTP with Chronos against on-path attackers seems…
A secure timeline is a tamper-evident historic record of the states through which a system goes throughout its operational history. Secure timelines can help us reason about the temporal ordering of system states in a provable manner. We…
Memory corruption vulnerabilities often enable attackers to take control of a target system by overwriting control-flow relevant data (such as return addresses and function pointers), which are potentially stored in close proximity of…
As cyber threats continue to evolve and diversify, it has become increasingly challenging to identify the root causes of security breaches that occur between periodic security assessments. This paper explores the fundamental importance of…
Side channels remain a challenge to information flow control and security in modern computing platforms. Resource partitioning techniques that minimise the number of shared resources among processes are often used to address this challenge.…
Imagine a group of citizens willing to collectively contribute their personal data for the common good to produce socially useful information, resulting from data analytics or machine learning computations. Sharing raw personal data with a…