Related papers: Time Protection: the Missing OS Abstraction
Caches are used to reduce the speed differential between the CPU and memory to improve the performance of modern processors. However, attackers can use contention-based cache timing attacks to steal sensitive information from victim…
Cybersecurity continues to be a difficult issue for society especially as the number of networked systems grows. Techniques to protect these systems range from rules-based to artificial intelligence-based intrusion detection systems and…
The security of computer systems fundamentally relies on memory isolation, e.g., kernel address ranges are marked as non-accessible and are protected from user access. In this paper, we present Meltdown. Meltdown exploits side effects of…
Covert channels can be utilized to secretly deliver information from high privileged processes to low privileged processes in the context of a high-assurance computing system. In this case study, we investigate the possibility of covert…
Modern computer architectures rely on caches to reduce the latency gap between the CPU and main memory. While indispensable for performance, caches pose a serious threat to security because they leak information about memory access patterns…
Modern processors are highly optimized systems where every single cycle of computation time matters. Many optimizations depend on the data that is being processed. Software-based microarchitectural attacks exploit effects of these…
With the recent advancements in machine learning theory, many commercial embedded micro-processors use neural network models for a variety of signal processing applications. However, their associated side-channel security vulnerabilities…
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…
Modern operating systems (OSes) have unfettered access to application data, assuming that applications trust them. This assumption, however, is problematic under many scenarios where either the OS provider is not trustworthy or the OS can…
Timing attacks are considered one of the most damaging side-channel attacks. These attacks exploit timing fluctuations caused by certain operations to disclose confidential information to an attacker. For instance, in asymmetric encryption,…
Modern x86 processors support an AVX instruction set to boost performance. However, this extension may cause security issues. We discovered that there are vulnerable properties in implementing masked load/store instructions. Based on this,…
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…
A large number of crypto accelerators are being deployed with the widespread adoption of IoT. It is vitally important that these accelerators and other security hardware IPs are provably secure. Security is an extra functional requirement…
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…
To meet the ever-growing need for performance in silicon devices, SoC providers have been increasingly relying on software-hardware cooperation. By controlling hardware resources such as power or clock management from the software,…
Selective data protection is a promising technique to defend against the data leakage attack. In this paper, we revisit technical challenges that were neglected when applying this protection to real applications. These challenges include…
To be secure, cryptographic algorithms crucially rely on the underlying hardware to avoid inadvertent leakage of secrets through timing side channels. Unfortunately, such timing channels are ubiquitous in modern hardware, due to its…
This paper proposes a system, entitled Concealer that allows sharing time-varying spatial data (e.g., as produced by sensors) in encrypted form to an untrusted third-party service provider to provide location-based applications (involving…
Detection and quantification of information leaks through timing side channels are important to guarantee confidentiality. Although static analysis remains the prevalent approach for detecting timing side channels, it is computationally…
This paper introduces a run-time mechanism for preventing leakage of secure information in distributed systems. We consider a general concurrency language model, where concurrent objects interact by asynchronous method calls and futures.…