Related papers: SPOILER: Speculative Load Hazards Boost Rowhammer …
Caches are used to reduce the speed differential between the CPU and memory to improve the performance of modern processors. However, attackers can use contention-based cache timing attacks to steal sensitive information from victim…
Cache randomization has recently been revived as a promising defense against conflict-based cache side-channel attacks. As two of the latest implementations, CEASER-S and ScatterCache both claim to thwart conflict-based cache side-channel…
The recent discovery of the Spectre and Meltdown attacks represents a watershed moment not just for the field of Computer Security, but also of Programming Languages. This paper explores speculative side-channel attacks and their…
Parallelization of A* path planning is mostly limited by the number of possible motions, which is far less than the level of parallelism that modern processors support. In this paper, we go beyond the limitations of traditional parallelism…
This paper argues and shows that speculative vectorization, where a loop with rare or unknown memory dependencies are still vectorized, is fundamentally vulnerable and cannot be mitigated by existing defenses. We implement a simple proof of…
Modern out-of-order CPUs heavily rely on speculative execution for performance optimization, with branch prediction serving as a cornerstone to minimize stalls and maximize efficiency. Whenever shared branch prediction resources lack proper…
Rowhammer is a hardware-based bug that allows the attacker to modify the data in the memory without accessing it, just repeatedly and frequently accessing (or hammering) physically adjacent memory rows. So that it can break the memory…
Recently discovered Spectre and meltdown attacks affects almost all processors by leaking confidential information to other processes through side-channel attacks. These vulnerabilities expose design flaws in the architecture of modern…
A fundamental assumption in software security is that a memory location can only be modified by processes that may write to this memory location. However, a recent study has shown that parasitic effects in DRAM can change the content of a…
Micro-architectural attacks use information leaked through shared resources to break hardware-enforced isolation. These attacks have been used to steal private information ranging from cryptographic keys to privileged Operating System (OS)…
Address translation is a major performance bottleneck in modern computing systems. Speculative address translation can hide this latency by predicting the physical address (PA) of requested data early in the pipeline. However, predicting…
Existing speculative execution attacks are limited to breaching confidentiality of data beyond privilege boundary, the so-called spectre-type attacks. All of them utilize the changes in microarchitectural buffers made by the speculative…
Modern x86 processors have many prefetch instructions that can be used by programmers to boost performance. However, these instructions may also cause security problems. In particular, we found that on Intel processors, there are two…
This dissertation rigorously characterizes many modern commodity DRAM devices and shows that by exploiting DRAM access timing margins within manufacturer-recommended DRAM timing specifications, we can significantly improve system…
The complexity of modern processor architectures has given rise to sophisticated interactions among their components. Such interactions may result in potential attack vectors in terms of side channels, possibly available to user-land…
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…
The Spectre vulnerability in modern processors has been widely reported. The key insight in this vulnerability is that speculative execution in processors can be misused to access the secrets. Subsequently, even though the speculatively…
Runahead execution is a continuously evolving microarchitectural technique for processor performance. This paper introduces the first transient execution attack on the runahead execution, called SPECRUN, which exploits the unresolved branch…
Rowhammer is a hardware vulnerability in DRAM memory, where repeated access to memory can induce bit flips in neighboring memory locations. Being a hardware vulnerability, rowhammer bypasses all of the system memory protection, allowing…
Microarchitectural side channel attacks have been very prominent in security research over the last few years. Caches have been an outstanding covert channel, as they provide high resolution and generic cross-core leakage even with simple…