Related papers: Processor Hardware Security Vulnerabilities and th…
Meltdown and Spectre exploit microarchitectural changes the CPU makes during transient out-of-order execution. Using side-channel techniques, these attacks enable leaking arbitrary data from memory. As state-of-the-art software mitigations…
The recent Spectre attacks has demonstrated the fundamental insecurity of current computer microarchitecture. The attacks use features like pipelining, out-of-order and speculation to extract arbitrary information about the memory contents…
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…
Speculative execution is a hardware optimisation technique where a processor, while waiting on the completion of a computation required for an instruction, continues to execute later instructions based on a predicted value of the pending…
Covert channel attacks represent a significant threat to system security, leveraging shared resources to clandestinely transmit information from highly secure systems, thereby violating the system's security policies. These attacks exploit…
SPEculative Execution side Channel Hardware (SPEECH) Vulnerabilities have enabled the notorious Meltdown, Spectre, and L1 terminal fault (L1TF) attacks. While a number of studies have reported different variants of SPEECH vulnerabilities,…
Spectre attacks exploit speculative execution to leak sensitive information. In the last few years, a number of static side-channel detectors have been proposed to detect cache leakage in the presence of speculative execution. However,…
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,…
Speculative execution attacks leverage the speculative and out-of-order execution features in modern computer processors to access secret data or execute code that should not be executed. Secret information can then be leaked through a…
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…
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…
Spectre, Meltdown, and related attacks have demonstrated that kernels, hypervisors, trusted execution environments, and browsers are prone to information disclosure through micro-architectural weaknesses. However, it remains unclear as to…
We present uSpectre, a new class of transient execution attacks that exploit microcode branch mispredictions to transiently leak sensitive data. We find that many long-known and recently-discovered transient execution attacks, which were…
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…
We present a kernel-level infrastructure that allows system-wide detection of malicious applications attempting to exploit cache-based side-channel attacks to break the process confinement enforced by standard operating systems. This…
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…
Side-channel attacks are a security exploit that take advantage of information leakage. They use measurement and analysis of physical parameters to reverse engineer and extract secrets from a system. Power analysis attacks in particular,…
Spectre attacks disclosed in early 2018 expose data leakage scenarios via cache side channels. Specifically, speculatively executed paths due to branch mis-prediction may bring secret data into the cache which are then exposed via cache…
Speculative attacks such as Spectre can leak secret information without being discovered by the operating system. Speculative execution vulnerabilities are finicky and deep in the sense that to exploit them, it requires intensive manual…
Security of embedded computing systems is becoming of paramount concern as these devices become more ubiquitous, contain personal information and are increasingly used for financial transactions. Security attacks targeting embedded systems…