Related papers: MI6: Secure Enclaves in a Speculative Out-of-Order…
Previous schemes for designing secure branch prediction unit (SBPU) based on physical isolation can only offer limited security and significantly affect BPU's prediction capability, leading to prominent performance degradation. Moreover,…
To improve efficiency, nearly all parallel processing units (CPUs and GPUs) implement relaxed memory models in which memory operations may be re-ordered, i.e., executed out-of-order. Prior testing work in this area found that memory…
An `obfuscation' for encrypted computing is quantified exactly here, leading to an argument that security against polynomial-time attacks has been achieved for user data via the deliberately `chaotic' compilation required for security…
Many hardware structures in today's high-performance out-of-order processors do not scale in an efficient way. To address this, different solutions have been proposed that build execution schedules in an energy-efficient manner. Issue time…
In recent years, we have witnessed unprecedented growth in using hardware-assisted Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) or enclaves to protect sensitive code and data on commodity devices thanks to new hardware security features, such as…
Hardware caches are essential performance optimization features in modern processors to reduce the effective memory access time. Unfortunately, they are also the prime targets for attacks on computer processors because they are…
The security of FPGAs is a crucial topic, as any vulnerability within the hardware can have severe consequences, if they are used in a secure design. Since FPGA designs are encoded in a bitstream, securing the bitstream is of the utmost…
Speculative attacks are still an active threat today that, even if initially focused on the x86 platform, reach across all modern hardware architectures. RISC-V is a newly proposed open instruction set architecture that has seen traction…
Spectre and Meltdown attacks and their variants exploit hardware performance optimization features to cause security breaches. Secret information is accessed and leaked through covert or side channels. New attack variants keep appearing and…
Modern microarchitectures are some of the world's most complex man-made systems. As a consequence, it is increasingly difficult to predict, explain, let alone optimize the performance of software running on such microarchitectures. As a…
Fault-injection attacks have been proven in the past to be a reliable way of bypassing hardware-based security measures, such as cryptographic hashes, privilege and access permission enforcement, and trusted execution environments. However,…
New hardware primitives such as Intel SGX secure a user-level process in presence of an untrusted or compromised OS. Such "enclaved execution" systems are vulnerable to several side-channels, one of which is the page fault channel. In this…
Recent proliferation of embedded systems has generated a bold new paradigm, known as open embedded systems. While traditional embedded systems provide only closed base applications (natively-installed software) to users, open embedded…
With the increasing deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) on mobile and edge platforms, securing them against model extraction attacks has become a pressing concern. However, protecting model privacy without sacrificing the performance…
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…
Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) on low-power microcontrollers (e.g., ARM TrustZone-M) enable isolation of Secure and Non-Secure software but still require both worlds to share resources, including interrupt controllers. In this model,…
Recent transient-execution attacks, such as RIDL, Fallout, and ZombieLoad, demonstrated that attackers can leak information while it transits through microarchitectural buffers. Named Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) by Intel, these…
Linux systems are integral to the infrastructure of modern computing environments, necessitating robust security measures to prevent unauthorized access. Privilege escalation attacks represent a significant threat, typically allowing…
Enforcing integrity and confidentiality of users' application code and data is a challenging mission that any software developer working on an online production grade service is facing. Since cryptology is not a widely understood subject,…
Data exfiltration attacks have led to huge data breaches. Recently, the Equifax attack affected 147M users and a third-party library - Apache Struts - was alleged to be responsible for it. These attacks often exploit the fact that sensitive…