English
Related papers

Related papers: Exorcising Spectres with Secure Compilers

200 papers

Fault injection attacks can cause errors in software for malicious purposes. Oftentimes, vulnerable points of a program are detected after its development. It is therefore critical for the user of the program to be able to apply last-minute…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-12-01 Pantea Kiaei , Cees-Bart Breunesse , Mohsen Ahmadi , Patrick Schaumont , Jasper van Woudenberg

Context: To effectively defend against ever-evolving cybersecurity threats, software systems should be made as secure as possible. To achieve this, software developers should understand potential vulnerabilities and apply secure coding…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2024-07-11 Alina Torbunova , Adnan Ashraf , Ivan Porres

Computer systems often provide hardware support for isolation mechanisms like privilege levels, virtual memory, or enclaved execution. Over the past years, several successful software-based side-channel attacks have been developed that…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-01-30 Matteo Busi , Job Noorman , Jo Van Bulck , Letterio Galletta , Pierpaolo Degano , Jan Tobias Mühlberg , Frank Piessens

Man-At-The-End (MATE) attackers are almighty adversaries against whom there exists no silver-bullet countermeasure. To raise the bar, a wide range of protection measures were proposed in the literature each of which adds resilience against…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-09-26 Mohsen Ahmadvand , Dennis Fischer , Sebastian Banescu

Index coding is concerned with efficient broadcast of a set of messages to receivers in the presence of receiver side information. In this paper, we study the secure index coding problem with security constraints on the receivers…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2020-04-16 Yucheng Liu , Parastoo Sadeghi , Neda Aboutorab , Arman Sharififar

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into software development workflows, they also become prime targets for adversarial attacks. Among these, backdoor attacks are a significant threat, allowing attackers to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Quoc Hung Le , Thanh Le-Cong , Bach Le , Bowen Xu

Evaluating the effectiveness of software protection is crucial for selecting the most effective methods to safeguard assets within software applications. Obfuscation involves techniques that deliberately modify software to make it more…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Leonardo Regano , Daniele Canavese , Cataldo Basile , Marco Torchiano

Since the advent of SPECTRE, a number of countermeasures have been proposed and deployed. Rigorously reasoning about their effectiveness, however, requires a well-defined notion of security against speculative execution attacks, which has…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-07-25 Marco Guarnieri , Boris Köpf , José F. Morales , Jan Reineke , Andrés Sánchez

CompCert is the first realistic formally verified compiler: it provides a machine-checked mathematical proof that the code it generates matches the source code. Yet, there could be loopholes in this approach. We comprehensively analyze…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2022-10-11 David Monniaux , Sylvain Boulmé

Encrypted computing is an emerging technology based on a processor that `works encrypted', taking encrypted inputs to encrypted outputs while data remains in encrypted form throughout. It aims to secure user data against possible insider…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Peter T. Breuer

Fault attacks against embedded circuits enabled to define many new attack paths against secure circuits. Every attack path relies on a specific fault model which defines the type of faults that the attacker can perform. On embedded…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2014-02-27 Nicolas Moro , Karine Heydemann , Emmanuelle Encrenaz , Bruno Robisson

A compiler is fully-abstract if the compilation from source language programs to target language programs reflects and preserves behavioural equivalence. Such compilers have important security benefits, as they limit the power of an…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2023-06-22 Dominique Devriese , Marco Patrignani , Frank Piessens , Steven Keuchel

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2014-10-28 Filippo Del Tedesco , David Sands , Alejandro Russo

Secure compilation aims to build compilation chains that preserve security properties when translating programs from a source to a target language. Recent research led to the definition of secure compilation principles that, if met,…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2019-01-17 Matteo Busi , Pierpaolo Degano , Letterio Galletta

Reasoning about correctness and security of software is increasingly difficult due to the complexity of modern microarchitectural features such as out-of-order execution. A class of security vulnerabilities termed Spectre that exploits side…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2020-04-02 Robert J. Colvin , Kirsten Winter

Memory safety remains a critical and widely violated property in reality. Numerous defense techniques have been proposed and developed but most of them are not applied or enabled by default in production-ready environment due to their…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Wei Song , Jiameng Ying , Sihao Shen , Boya Li , Hao Ma , Peng Liu

Practical attacks that exploit speculative execution can leak confidential information via microarchitectural side channels. The recently-demonstrated Spectre attacks leverage speculative loads which circumvent access checks to read…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-07-11 Vladimir Kiriansky , Carl Waldspurger

As large language models (LLMs) increasingly integrate native code interpreters, they enable powerful real-time execution capabilities, substantially expanding their utility. However, such integrations introduce potential system-level…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Gabriel Chua

Capability machines such as CHERI provide memory capabilities that can be used by compilers to provide security benefits for compiled code (e.g., memory safety). The existing C to CHERI compiler, for example, achieves memory safety by…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2021-05-05 Akram El-Korashy , Stelios Tsampas , Marco Patrignani , Dominique Devriese , Deepak Garg , Frank Piessens

Compiler optimizations are designed to improve run-time performance while preserving input-output behavior. Correctness in this sense does not necessarily preserve security: it is known that standard optimizations may break or weaken…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2019-11-15 Kedar S. Namjoshi , Lucas M. Tabajara