Related papers: Time Protection: the Missing OS Abstraction

Although cryptographic algorithms may be mathematically secure, it is often possible to leak secret information from the implementation of the algorithms. Timing and power side-channel vulnerabilities are some of the most widely considered…

Per Row Activation Counting (PRAC) has emerged as a robust framework for mitigating RowHammer (RH) vulnerabilities in modern DRAM systems. However, we uncover a critical vulnerability: a timing channel introduced by the Alert Back-Off (ABO)…

We present a software approach to mitigate access-driven side-channel attacks that leverage last-level caches (LLCs) shared across cores to leak information between security domains (e.g., tenants in a cloud). Our approach dynamically…

In the last two decades, the evolving cyber-threat landscape has brought to center stage the contentious tradeoffs between the security and performance of modern microprocessors. The guarantees provided by the hardware to ensure no…

In the last years, a series of side channels have been discovered on CPUs. These side channels have been used in powerful attacks, e.g., on cryptographic implementations, or as building blocks in transient-execution attacks such as Spectre…

Developers rely on constant-time programming to prevent timing side-channel attacks. But these efforts can be undone by compilers, whose optimizations may silently reintroduce leaks. While recent works have measured the extent of such…

Compression algorithms are widely used as they save memory without losing data. However, elimination of redundant symbols and sequences in data leads to a compression side channel. So far, compression attacks have only focused on the…

Cache timing attack is a type of side channel attack where the leaking timing information due to the cache behaviour of a crypto system is used by an attacker to break the system. Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) was considered a secure…

The transient execution attack is a type of attack leveraging the vulnerability of modern CPU optimization technologies. New attacks surface rapidly. The side-channel is a key part of transient execution attacks to leak data. In this work,…

Windows OS kernel memory is one of the main targets of cyber-attacks. By launching such attacks, hackers are succeeding in process privilege escalation and tampering with users data by accessing kernel mode memory. This paper considers a…

Microarchitectural timing attacks exploit subtle timing variations caused by hardware behaviors to leak sensitive information. In this paper, we introduce MCHammer, a novel side-channel technique that leverages machine clears induced by…

The security of applications hinges on the trustworthiness of the operating system, as applications rely on the OS to protect code and data. As a result, multiple protections for safeguarding the integrity of kernel code and data are being…

This work focuses on eliminating timing-side channels in real-time safety-critical cyber-physical network protocols like Controller Area Networks (CAN). Automotive Electronic Control Units (ECUs) implement predictable scheduling decisions…

Microarchitectural timing attacks are a type of information leakage attack, which exploit the time-shared microarchitectural components, such as caches, translation look-aside buffers (TLBs), branch prediction unit (BPU), and speculative…

Stream processing systems are important in modern applications in which data arrive continuously and need to be processed in real time. Because of their resource and scalability requirements, many of these systems run on the cloud, which is…

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…

Clock synchronization has become essential to modern societies since many critical infrastructures depend on a precise notion of time. This paper analyzes security aspects of high-precision clock synchronization protocols, particularly…

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) integrate sensing, computing, communication and actuation capabilities to monitor and control operations in the physical environment. A key requirement of such systems is the need to provide predictable…

We present a new hardware-agnostic side-channel attack that targets one of the most fundamental software caches in modern computer systems: the operating system page cache. The page cache is a pure software cache that contains all…

Kernel rootkits provide adversaries with permanent high-privileged access to compromised systems and are often a key element of sophisticated attack chains. At the same time, they enable stealthy operation and are thus difficult to detect.…