Related papers: SMoTherSpectre: exploiting speculative execution t…
Security critical software, e.g., OpenSSL, comes with numerous side-channel leakages left unpatched due to a lack of resources or experts. The situation will only worsen as the pace of code development accelerates, with developers relying…
Side-channel attacks such as Spectre that utilize speculative execution to steal application secrets pose a significant threat to modern computing systems. While program transformations can mitigate some Spectre attacks, more advanced…
Side-channel attacks on memory (SCAM) exploit unintended data leaks from memory subsystems to infer sensitive information, posing significant threats to system security. These attacks exploit vulnerabilities in memory access patterns, cache…
A new class of vulnerabilities related to speculative and out-of-order execution, fault-injection, and microarchitectural side channels rose to attention in 2018. The techniques behind the transient execution vulnerabilities were not new,…
In Go, the widespread adoption of open-source software has led to a flourishing ecosystem of third-party dependencies, which are often integrated into critical systems. However, the reuse of dependencies introduces significant supply chain…
In the context of prediction-as-a-service, concerns about the privacy of the data and the model have been brought up and tackled via secure inference protocols. These protocols are built up by using single or multiple cryptographic tools…
The prevalence of memory corruption bugs in the past decades resulted in numerous defenses, such as stack canaries, control flow integrity (CFI), and memory safe languages. These defenses can prevent entire classes of vulnerabilities, and…
Speculative multi-threading (SpMT) has been proposed as a perspective method to exploit Chip Multiprocessors (CMP) hardware potential. It is a thread level speculation (TLS) model mainly depending on software and hardware co-design. This…
In this paper, we reveal the existence of a new class of prefetcher, the XPT prefetcher, in the modern Intel processors which has never been officially documented. It speculatively issues a load, bypassing last-level cache (LLC) lookups,…
Self-modifying code (SMC) allows programs to alter their own instructions, optimizing performance and functionality on x86 processors. Despite its benefits, SMC introduces unique microarchitectural behaviors that can be exploited for…
Trusted execution environments (TEEs) offer hardware-assisted means to protect code and data. However, as shown in numerous results over the years, attackers can use side-channels to leak data access patterns and even single-step the code.…
Cybersecurity research increasingly depends on reproducible evidence, such as traffic traces, logs, and labeled datasets, yet most public datasets remain static and offer limited support for controlled re-execution and traceability,…
Exceptions are a commodity hardware functionality which is central to multi-tasking OSes as well as event-driven user applications. Normally, the OS assists the user application by lifting the semantics of exceptions received from hardware…
Homomorphic encryption provides many opportunities for privacy-aware processing, including with methods related to machine learning. Many of our existing cryptographic methods have been shown in the past to be susceptible to side channel…
There can be performance and vulnerability concerns with block ciphers, thus stream ciphers can used as an alternative. Although many symmetric key stream ciphers are fairly resistant to side-channel attacks, cryptographic artefacts may…
Embedded devices are increasingly present in our everyday life. They often process critical information, and hence, rely on cryptographic protocols to achieve security. However, embedded devices remain vulnerable to attackers seeking to…
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,…
Side-channel attacks have become prominent attack surfaces in cyberspace. Attackers use the side information generated by the system while performing a task. Among the various side-channel attacks, cache side-channel attacks are leading as…
Recently, out-of-order execution, an important performance optimization in modern high-end processors, has been revealed to pose a significant security threat, allowing information leaks across security domains. In particular, the Meltdown…
Caches on the modern commodity CPUs have become one of the major sources of side-channel leakages and been abused as a new attack vector. To thwart the cache-based side-channel attacks, two types of countermeasures have been proposed:…