Related papers: Taking a Look into Execute-Only Memory

In-host shared memory (IVSHMEM) enables high-throughput, zero-copy communication between virtual machines, but today's implementations lack any security control, allowing any application to eavesdrop or tamper with the IVSHMEM region. This…

Cybercriminals use Return Oriented Programming techniques to attack systems and IoT devices. While defenses have been developed, not all of them are applicable to constrained devices. We present Shakedown, which is a compile-time…

Many commercially available memory chips are fabricated worldwide in untrusted facilities. Therefore, a counterfeit memory chip can easily enter into the supply chain in different formats. Deploying these counterfeit memory chips into an…

Memory errors continue to be a critical concern for programs written in low-level programming languages such as C and C++. Many different memory error defenses have been proposed, each with varying trade-offs in terms of overhead,…

Analyzing the security of closed-source drivers and libraries in embedded systems holds significant importance, given their fundamental role in the supply chain. Unlike x86, embedded platforms lack comprehensive binary manipulating tools,…

Modern society is getting accustomed to the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) for a variety of applications that involves security-critical user data and information transfers. In the lower end of the spectrum, these…

In modern computing environments, hardware resources are commonly shared, and parallel computation is widely used. Parallel tasks can cause privacy and security problems if proper isolation is not enforced. Intel proposed SGX to create a…

Microarchitectural timing attacks are a type of information leakage attack, which exploit the time-shared microarchitectural components, such as caches, translation look-aside buffers (TLBs), branch prediction unit (BPU), and speculative…

Shared-memory system-on-chips (SM-SoC) are ubiquitously employed by a wide-range of mobile computing platforms, including edge/IoT devices, autonomous systems and smartphones. In SM-SoCs, system-wide shared physical memory enables a…

The importance of preventing microarchitectural timing side channels in security-critical applications has surged in recent years. Constant-time programming has emerged as a best-practice technique for preventing the leakage of secret…

Memory safety is a cornerstone of secure and robust software systems, as it prevents a wide range of vulnerabilities and exploitation techniques. Among these, we focus on Return-Oriented Programming (ROP). ROP works as such: the attacker…

In this paper, we introduce two algorithms that solve the mutual exclusion problem for concurrent processes that communicate through shared variables, [2]. Our algorithms guarantee that any process trying to enter the critical section,…

Programming microcontrollers involves low-level interfacing with hardware and peripherals that are concurrent and reactive. Such programs are typically written in a mixture of C and assembly using concurrent language extensions (like…

The USB protocol has become ubiquitous, supporting devices from high-powered computing devices to small embedded devices and control systems. USB's greatest feature, its openness and expandability, is also its weakness, and attacks such as…

Moore's law has long served the semiconductor industry as the driving force for producing ever-advancing electronics technologies. However, given the economic implications and technological challenges associated with the present…

This retrospective paper describes the RowHammer problem in Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM), which was initially introduced by Kim et al. at the ISCA 2014 conference~\cite{rowhammer-isca2014}. RowHammer is a prime (and perhaps the…

The power consumption of a microprocessor is a huge channel for information leakage. While the most popular exploitation of this channel is to recover cryptographic keys from embedded devices, other applications such as mobile app…

Side-channel attacks on memory (SCAM) exploit unintended data leaks from memory subsystems to infer sensitive information, posing significant threats to system security. These attacks exploit vulnerabilities in memory access patterns, cache…

Microcontroller-based IoT devices often use embedded real-time operating systems (RTOSs). Vulnerabilities in these embedded RTOSs can lead to compromises of those IoT devices. Despite the significance of security protections, the absence of…

This paper shows how an attacker can break the confidentiality of a hardware enclave with Membuster, an off-chip attack based on snooping the memory bus. An attacker with physical access can observe an unencrypted address bus and extract…