Related papers: Time Protection: the Missing OS Abstraction
The wide deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) has given rise to strong demands for optimizing their inference performance. Today's techniques serving this purpose primarily focus on reducing latency and improving throughput through…
Recent studies highlighting the vulnerability of computer architecture to information leakage attacks have been a cause of significant concern. Among the various classes of microarchitectural attacks, cache timing channels are especially…
Trusted execution environments (TEEs) provide an environment for running workloads in the cloud without having to trust cloud service providers, by offering additional hardware-assisted security guarantees. However, main memory encryption…
Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) on low-power microcontrollers (e.g., ARM TrustZone-M) enable isolation of Secure and Non-Secure software but still require both worlds to share resources, including interrupt controllers. In this model,…
Information leakage can have dramatic consequences on systems security. Among harmful information leaks, the timing information leakage is the ability for an attacker to deduce internal information depending on the system execution time. We…
The power consumption of a microprocessor is a huge channel for information leakage. While the most popular exploitation of this channel is to recover cryptographic keys from embedded devices, other applications such as mobile app…
Quantum computing offers significant acceleration capabilities over its classical counterpart in various application domains. Consequently, there has been substantial focus on improving quantum computing capabilities. However, to date, the…
New hardware primitives such as Intel SGX secure a user-level process in presence of an untrusted or compromised OS. Such "enclaved execution" systems are vulnerable to several side-channels, one of which is the page fault channel. In this…
Timing side-channels represent an insidious security challenge for cloud computing, because: (a) massive parallelism in the cloud makes timing channels pervasive and hard to control; (b) timing channels enable one customer to steal…
Microarchitectural side channel attacks have been very prominent in security research over the last few years. Caches have been an outstanding covert channel, as they provide high resolution and generic cross-core leakage even with simple…
Cryptographic research takes software timing side channels seriously. Approaches to mitigate them include constant-time coding and techniques to enforce such practices. However, recent attacks like Meltdown [42], Spectre [37], and…
We demonstrate the presence of a novel scheduler side-channel in preemptive, fixed-priority real-time systems (RTS); examples of such systems can be found in automotive systems, avionic systems, power plants and industrial control systems…
Timing-based side and covert channels in processor caches continue to be a threat to modern computers. This work shows for the first time a systematic, large-scale analysis of Arm devices and the detailed results of attacks the processors…
Trusted execution environments (TEEs) offer hardware-assisted means to protect code and data. However, as shown in numerous results over the years, attackers can use side-channels to leak data access patterns and even single-step the code.…
The massive parallelism and resource sharing embodying today's cloud business model not only exacerbate the security challenge of timing channels, but also undermine the viability of defenses based on resource partitioning. We propose…
Protected user-level libraries have been proposed as a way to allow mutually distrusting applications to safely share kernel-bypass services. In this paper, we identify and solve several previously unaddressed obstacles to realizing this…
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…
Operating Systems enforce logical isolation using abstractions such as processes, containers, and isolation technologies to protect a system from malicious or buggy code. In this paper, we show new types of side channels through the file…
Real-time cyber-physical systems depend on deterministic task execution to guarantee safety and correctness. Unfortunately, this determinism can unintentionally expose timing information that enables adversaries to infer task execution…
This paper evaluates new security threats due to the processor frontend in modern Intel processors. The root causes of the security threats are the multiple paths in the processor frontend that the micro-operations can take: through the…