Related papers: ConTExT: Leakage-Free Transient Execution
Conthereum is a concurrent Ethereum solution for intra-block parallel transaction execution, enabling validators to utilize multi-core infrastructure and transform the sequential execution model of Ethereum into a parallel one. This shift…
Stack-based memory corruption vulnerabilities have long been exploited by attackers to execute arbitrary code or perform unauthorized memory operations. Various defense mechanisms have been introduced to mitigate stack memory errors, but…
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…
Confidential container is becoming increasingly popular as it meets both needs for efficient resource management by cloud providers, and data protection by cloud users. Specifically, confidential containers integrate the container and the…
Throughput limitations of existing blockchain architectures are well documented and are one of the most significant hurdles for their wide-spread adoption. In our previous proof-of-concept work, we have shown that separating computation…
Memory disclosure attacks play an important role in the exploitation of memory corruption vulnerabilities. By analyzing recent research, we observe that bypasses of defensive solutions that enforce control-flow integrity or attempt to…
Hardware-based Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are becoming increasingly prevalent in cloud computing, forming the basis for confidential computing. However, the security goals of TEEs sometimes conflict with existing cloud…
The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), as a core computation in a wide range of scientific applications, is increasingly threatened by reliability issues. In this paper, we introduce TurboFFT, a high-performance FFT implementation equipped with…
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…
Speculative execution is an optimization technique that has been part of CPUs for over a decade. It predicts the outcome and target of branch instructions to avoid stalling the execution pipeline. However, until recently, the security…
Acoustic-sensor-based soft error resilience is particularly promising, since it can verify the absence of soft errors and eliminate silent data corruptions at a low hardware cost. However, the state-of-the-art work incurs a significant…
Environmental noise (e.g.heat, ionized particles, etc.) causes transient faults in hardware, which lead to corruption of stored values. Mission-critical devices require such faults to be mitigated by fault-tolerance --- a combination of…
Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) have been proposed as a solution to protect code confidentiality in scenarios where computation is outsourced to an untrusted operator. We study the resilience of such solutions to side-channel attacks…
Cloud computing has emerged as a corner stone of today's computing landscape. More and more customers who outsource their infrastructure benefit from the manageability, scalability and cost saving that come with cloud computing. Those…
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…
Executing code is essential for various program analysis tasks, e.g., to detect bugs that manifest through exceptions or to obtain execution traces for further dynamic analysis. However, executing an arbitrary piece of code is often…
Although blockchains have become widely popular for their use in cryptocurrencies, they are now becoming pervasive as more traditional applications adopt blockchain to ensure data security. Despite being a secured network, blockchains have…
A smart contract on a blockchain cannot keep a secret because its data is replicated on all nodes in a network. To remedy this problem, it has been suggested to combine blockchains with trusted execution environments (TEEs), such as Intel…
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…
In recent years, there have emerged many new hardware mechanisms for improving the security of our computer systems. Hardware offers many advantages over pure software approaches: immutability of mechanisms to software attacks, better…