Related papers: Fallout: Reading Kernel Writes From User Space
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…
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…
The transient-execution attack Meltdown leaks sensitive information by transiently accessing inaccessible data during out-of-order execution. Although Meltdown is fixed in hardware for recent CPU generations, most currently-deployed CPUs…
In early 2018, Meltdown first showed how to read arbitrary kernel memory from user space by exploiting side-effects from transient instructions. While this attack has been mitigated through stronger isolation boundaries between user and…
Meltdown and Spectre exploit microarchitectural changes the CPU makes during transient out-of-order execution. Using side-channel techniques, these attacks enable leaking arbitrary data from memory. As state-of-the-art software mitigations…
Transient execution attacks, also called speculative execution attacks, have drawn much interest as they exploit the transient execution of instructions, e.g., during branch prediction, to leak data. Transient execution is fundamental to…
Research on transient execution attacks including Spectre and Meltdown showed that exception or branch misprediction events might leave secret-dependent traces in the CPU's microarchitectural state. This observation led to a proliferation…
Recent discovery of security attacks in advanced processors, known as Spectre and Meltdown, has resulted in high public alertness about security of hardware. The root cause of these attacks is information leakage across "covert channels"…
We propose using reinforcement learning to address the challenges of discovering microarchitectural vulnerabilities, such as Spectre and Meltdown, which exploit subtle interactions in modern processors. Traditional methods like random…
In the last two decades, the evolving cyber-threat landscape has brought to center stage the contentious tradeoffs between the security and performance of modern microprocessors. The guarantees provided by the hardware to ensure no…
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…
The transient execution attack is a type of attack leveraging the vulnerability of modern CPU optimization technologies. New attacks surface rapidly. The side-channel is a key part of transient execution attacks to leak data. In this work,…
This paper evaluates new security threats due to the processor frontend in modern Intel processors. The root causes of the security threats are the multiple paths in the processor frontend that the micro-operations can take: through the…
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…
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…
CPUs provide isolation mechanisms like virtualization and privilege levels to protect software. Yet these focus on architectural isolation while typically overlooking microarchitectural side channels, exemplified by Meltdown and Foreshadow.…
Recent years have brought microarchitectural security intothe spotlight, proving that modern CPUs are vulnerable toseveral classes of microarchitectural attacks. These attacksbypass the basic isolation primitives provided by the…
We introduce a new timing side-channel attack on Intel CPU processors. Our Frontal attack exploits timing differences that arise from how the CPU frontend fetches and processes instructions while being interrupted. In particular, we observe…
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,…
Recent work has shown that out-of-order and speculative execution mechanisms used to increase performance in the majority of processors expose the processors to critical attacks. These attacks, called Meltdown and Spectre, exploit the side…