Related papers: SPECCFI: Mitigating Spectre Attacks using CFI Info…
Spectre vulnerabilities violate our fundamental assumptions about architectural abstractions, allowing attackers to steal sensitive data despite previously state-of-the-art countermeasures. To defend against Spectre, developers of…
Recent research has revealed an ever-growing class of microarchitectural attacks that exploit speculative execution, a standard feature in modern processors. Proposed and deployed countermeasures involve a variety of compiler updates,…
Since the discovery of Spectre, a large number of hardware mechanisms for secure speculation has been proposed. Intuitively, more defensive mechanisms are less efficient but can securely execute a larger class of programs, while more…
Fault injection attacks (FIA) pose significant security threats to embedded systems as they exploit weaknesses across multiple layers, including system software, instruction set architecture (ISA), microarchitecture, and physical hardware.…
We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of FineIBT: a CFI enforcement mechanism that improves the precision of hardware-assisted CFI solutions, like Intel IBT, by instrumenting program code to reduce the valid/allowed targets…
The Spectre speculative side-channel attacks pose formidable threats for security. Research has shown that code following the cryptographic constant-time discipline can be efficiently protected against Spectre v1 using a selective variant…
Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) is a promising hardware-based technology for protecting sensitive computations from potentially compromised system software. However, recent research has shown that SGX is vulnerable to branch-shadowing…
Website fingerprinting (WF) attacks, which covertly monitor user communications to identify the web pages they visit, pose a serious threat to user privacy. Existing WF defenses attempt to reduce attack accuracy by disrupting traffic…
Hardware and software of secured embedded systems are prone to physical attacks. In particular, fault injection attacks revealed vulnerabilities on the data and the control flow allowing an attacker to break cryptographic or secured…
Spectre and Meltdown attacks and their variants exploit hardware performance optimization features to cause security breaches. Secret information is accessed and leaked through covert or side channels. New attack variants keep appearing and…
Low-end embedded devices are increasingly used in various smart applications and spaces. They are implemented under strict cost and energy budgets, using microcontroller units (MCUs) that lack security features available in general-purpose…
Dynamic Information Flow Tracking (DIFT) is a technique to track potential security vulnerabilities in software and hardware systems at run time. The last fifteen years have seen a lot of research work on DIFT, including both hardware-based…
Modern out-of-order processors face speculative execution attacks. Despite various proposed software and hardware mitigations to prevent such attacks, new attacks keep arising from unknown vulnerabilities. Thus, a formal and rigorous…
We present Janus, a compiler-based security framework that mitigates transient execution attacks like Spectre and control-flow hijacking on ARM64 platforms. Janus integrates speculative execution and control flow dependencies with PA…
Neuromorphic computing and spiking neural networks (SNNs) are gaining traction across various artificial intelligence (AI) tasks thanks to their potential for efficient energy usage and faster computation speed. This comparative advantage…
Modern processors have suffered a deluge of threats exploiting branch instruction collisions inside the branch prediction unit (BPU), from eavesdropping on secret-related branch operations to triggering malicious speculative executions.…
The wide adoption of IoT gadgets and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) makes embedded devices increasingly important. While some of these devices perform mission-critical tasks, they are usually implemented using Micro-Controller Units (MCUs)…
We propose ProSpeCT, a generic formal processor model providing provably secure speculation for the constant-time policy. For constant-time programs under a non-speculative semantics, ProSpeCT guarantees that speculative and out-of-order…
Smart contracts power decentralized financial (DeFi) services but are vulnerable to security exploits that can lead to significant financial losses. Existing security measures often fail to adequately protect these contracts due to the…
The advent of Federated Learning (FL) as a distributed machine learning paradigm has introduced new cybersecurity challenges, notably adversarial attacks that threaten model integrity and participant privacy. This study proposes an…