Related papers: MI6: Secure Enclaves in a Speculative Out-of-Order…
Computer systems often provide hardware support for isolation mechanisms like privilege levels, virtual memory, or enclaved execution. Over the past years, several successful software-based side-channel attacks have been developed that…
Transient execution side-channel attacks, such as Spectre, have been shown to break almost all isolation primitives. We introduce a new security property we call relaxed microarchitectural isolation (RMI) that allows sensitive programs that…
Enclaves have emerged as a particularly compelling primitive to implement trusted execution environments: strongly isolated sensitive user-mode processes in a largely untrusted software environment. While the threat models employed by…
Speculative execution which is used pervasively in modern CPUs can leave side effects in the processor caches and other structures even when the speculated instructions do not commit and their direct effect is not visible. The recent…
Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) enables user-level code to create private memory regions called enclaves, whose code and data are protected by the CPU from software and hardware attacks outside the enclaves. Recent work introduces…
Microprocessors enable aggressive hardware virtualization by means of which multiple processes temporally execute on the system. These security-critical and ordinary processes interact with each other to assure application progress.…
Modern processors can offer hardware primitives that allow a process to run in isolation. These primitives implement a trusted execution environment (TEE) in which a program can run such that the integrity and confidentiality of its…
Demand for data-intensive workloads and confidential computing are the prominent research directions shaping the future of cloud computing. Computer architectures are evolving to accommodate the computing of large data better. Protecting…
Speculative execution techniques have been a cornerstone of modern processors to improve instruction-level parallelism. However, recent studies showed that this kind of techniques could be exploited by attackers to leak secret data via…
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…
Out-of-order speculation, a technique ubiquitous since the early 1990s, remains a fundamental security flaw. Via attacks such as Spectre and Meltdown, an attacker can trick a victim, in an otherwise entirely correct program, into leaking…
Hardware-enclaves that target complex CPU designs compromise both security and performance. Programs have little control over micro-architecture, which leads to side-channel leaks, and then have to be transformed to have worst-case control-…
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…
Recent work has shown that out-of-order and speculative execution mechanisms used to increase performance in the majority of processors expose the processors to critical attacks. These attacks, called Meltdown and Spectre, exploit the side…
The disclosure of the Spectre speculative-execution attacks in January 2018 has left a severe vulnerability that systems are still struggling with how to patch. The solutions that currently exist tend to have incomplete coverage, perform…
CPUs provide isolation mechanisms like virtualization and privilege levels to protect software. Yet these focus on architectural isolation while typically overlooking microarchitectural side channels, exemplified by Meltdown and Foreshadow.…
The recent Spectre attacks have demonstrated that modern microarchitectural optimizations can make software insecure. These attacks use features like pipelining, out-of-order and speculation to extract information about the memory contents…
Spectre attacks exploit microprocessor speculative execution to read and transmit forbidden data outside the attacker's trust domain and sandbox. Recent hardware schemes allow potentially-unsafe speculative accesses but prevent the secret's…
FPGA-based hardware accelerators are becoming increasingly popular due to their versatility, customizability, energy efficiency, constant latency, and scalability. FPGAs can be tailored to specific algorithms, enabling efficient hardware…
Since its debut, SGX has been used in many applications, e.g., secure data processing. However, previous systems usually assume a trusted enclave and ignore the security issues caused by an untrusted enclave. For instance, a vulnerable (or…