Related papers: SPECCFI: Mitigating Spectre Attacks using CFI Info…

The increasing sophistication of modern cyber threats, particularly file-less malware relying on living-off-the-land techniques, poses significant challenges to traditional detection mechanisms. Memory forensics has emerged as a crucial…

Spectre attacks enable an attacker to access restricted data in an application's memory. Both the academic community and industry veterans have developed several mitigations to block Spectre attacks, but to date, very few have been formally…

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"…

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…

This paper provides a systematic exploration of Control Flow Integrity (CFI) and Control Flow Attestation (CFA) mechanisms, examining their differences and relationships. It addresses crucial questions about the goals, assumptions,…

Systems-on-chip (SoCs) are becoming heterogeneous: they combine general-purpose processor cores with application-specific hardware components, also known as accelerators, to improve performance and energy efficiency. The advantages of…

In recent years, several hardware-based countermeasures proposed to mitigate Spectre attacks have been shown to be insecure. To enable the development of effective secure speculation countermeasures, we need easy-to-use tools that can…

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…

EMFI has become a popular fault injection (FI) technique due to its ability to inject faults precisely considering timing and location. Recently, ARM, RISC-V, and even x86 processing units in different packages were shown to be vulnerable…

The enormous amount of code required to design modern hardware implementations often leads to critical vulnerabilities being overlooked. Especially vulnerabilities that compromise the confidentiality of sensitive data, such as cryptographic…

Recent optical flow methods are almost exclusively judged in terms of accuracy, while their robustness is often neglected. Although adversarial attacks offer a useful tool to perform such an analysis, current attacks on optical flow methods…

Prior research yielded many techniques to mitigate software compromise for low-end Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Some of them detect software modifications via remote attestation and similar services, while others preventatively ensure…

Many cybersecurity attacks rely on analyzing a binary executable to find exploitable sections of code. Code obfuscation is used to prevent attackers from reverse engineering these executables. In this work, we focus on control flow…

Modern targeted attacks such as Advanced Persistent Threats use multiple hosts as stepping stones and move laterally across them to gain deeper access to the network. However, existing defenses lack end-to-end information flow visibility…

Fault injection attacks represent a class of threats that can compromise embedded systems across multiple layers of abstraction, such as system software, instruction set architecture (ISA), microarchitecture, and physical implementation.…

Constant-time (CT) verification tools are commonly used for detecting potential side-channel vulnerabilities in cryptographic libraries. Recently, a new class of tools, called speculative constant-time (SCT) tools, has also been used for…

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…

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,…

Existing speculative execution attacks are limited to breaching confidentiality of data beyond privilege boundary, the so-called spectre-type attacks. All of them utilize the changes in microarchitectural buffers made by the speculative…

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…