Related papers: ZombieLoad: Cross-Privilege-Boundary Data Sampling
The widespread adoption of thinking mode in large language models (LLMs) has significantly enhanced complex task processing capabilities while introducing new security risks. When subjected to jailbreak attacks, the step-by-step reasoning…
Backend enrichment is now widely deployed in sensitive domains such as product recommendation pipelines, healthcare, and finance, where models are trained on confidential data and retrieve private features whose values influence inference…
To improve the overall performance of processors, computer architects use various performance optimization techniques in modern processors, such as speculative execution, branch prediction, and chaotic execution. Both now and in the future,…
Flushing the cache, using instructions like clflush and wbinvd, is commonly proposed as a countermeasure against access-based cache attacks. In this report, we show that several Intel caches, specifically the L1 caches in some pre-Skylake…
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…
Performance degradation techniques are an important complement to side-channel attacks. In this work, we propose HyperDegrade -- a combination of previous approaches and the use of simultaneous multithreading (SMT) architectures. In…
Large Language Models face an emerging and critical threat known as latency attacks. Because LLM inference is inherently expensive, even modest slowdowns can translate into substantial operating costs and severe availability risks.…
There is a long history of side channels in the memory hierarchy of modern CPUs. Especially the cache side channel is widely used in the context of transient execution attacks and covert channels. Therefore, many secure cache architectures…
Modern large reasoning models (LRMs) exhibit impressive multi-step problem-solving via chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. However, this iterative thinking mechanism introduces a new vulnerability surface. We present the Deadlock Attack, a…
We present uSpectre, a new class of transient execution attacks that exploit microcode branch mispredictions to transiently leak sensitive data. We find that many long-known and recently-discovered transient execution attacks, which were…
Modern processors are highly optimized systems where every single cycle of computation time matters. Many optimizations depend on the data that is being processed. Software-based microarchitectural attacks exploit effects of these…
Machine learning systems are deployed in critical settings, but they might fail in unexpected ways, impacting the accuracy of their predictions. Poisoning attacks against machine learning induce adversarial modification of data used by a…
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…
The paper demonstrates how traffic load of a shared packet queue can be exploited as a side channel through which protected information leaks to an off-path attacker. The attacker sends to a victim a sequence of identical spoofed segments.…
Side-channel attacks on shared hardware resources increasingly threaten confidentiality, especially with the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs). In this work, we introduce Spill The Beans, a novel application of cache side-channels to…
Practical attacks that exploit speculative execution can leak confidential information via microarchitectural side channels. The recently-demonstrated Spectre attacks leverage speculative loads which circumvent access checks to read…
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…
Time variation during program execution can leak sensitive information. Time variations due to program control flow and hardware resource contention have been used to steal encryption keys in cipher implementations such as AES and RSA. A…
Recent attacks have broken process isolation by exploiting microarchitectural side channels that allow indirect access to shared microarchitectural state. Enclaves strengthen the process abstraction to restore isolation guarantees. We…
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…