Related papers: Processor Hardware Security Vulnerabilities and th…
Out-of-order execution and speculative execution are among the biggest contributors to performance and efficiency of modern processors. However, they are inconsiderate, leaking secret data during the transient execution of instructions.…
Modern processors widely equip the Performance Monitoring Unit (PMU) to collect various architecture and microarchitecture events. Software developers often utilize the PMU to enhance program's performance, but the potential side effects…
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…
Side-channel attacks have become a severe threat to the confidentiality of computer applications and systems. One popular type of such attacks is the microarchitectural attack, where the adversary exploits the hardware features to break the…
Attacks on the microarchitecture of modern processors have become a practical threat to security and privacy in desktop and cloud computing. Recently, cache attacks have successfully been demonstrated on ARM based mobile devices, suggesting…
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…
CPU cache is a limited but crucial storage component in modern processors, whereas the cache timing side-channel may inadvertently leak information through the physically measurable timing variance. Speculative execution, an essential…
Microcode is an abstraction layer used by modern x86 processors that interprets user-visible CISC instructions to hardware-internal RISC instructions. The capability to update x86 microcode enables a vendor to modify CPU behavior in-field,…
Over the past few years, several research groups have introduced innovative hardware designs for Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), aiming to secure applications against potentially compromised privileged software, including the kernel.…
Discovering new vulnerabilities and implementing security and privacy measures are important to protect systems and data against physical attacks. One such vulnerability is impedance, an inherent property of a device that can be exploited…
Transient execution attacks have been one of the widely explored microarchitectural side channels since the discovery of Spectre and Meltdown. However, much of the research has been driven by manual discovery of new transient paths through…
Port scanning is the process of attempting to connect to various network ports on a computing endpoint to determine which ports are open and which services are running on them. It is a common method used by hackers to identify…
Malware usually target computers according to their operating system. Thus we have Windows malwares, Linux malwares and so on ... In this paper, we consider a different approach and show on a technical basis how easily malware can recognize…
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…
Covert channel attacks have been continuously studied as severe threats to modern computing systems. Software-based covert channels are a typically hard-to-detect branch of these attacks, since they leverage virtual resources to establish…
Speculative execution enhances processor performance by predicting intermediate results and executing instructions based on these predictions. However, incorrect predictions can lead to security vulnerabilities, as speculative instructions…
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…
Spectre v1 attacks, which exploit conditional branch misprediction, are often identified with attacks that bypass array bounds checking to leak data from a victim's memory. Generally, however, Spectre v1 attacks can exploit any conditional…
The identification of safe faults (i.e., faults which are guaranteed not to produce any failure) in an electronic system is a crucial step when analyzing its dependability and its test plan development. Unfortunately, safe fault…
Fault injection attacks represent a class of threats that can compromise embedded systems across multiple layers of abstraction, such as system software, instruction set architecture (ISA), microarchitecture, and physical implementation.…