Related papers: Exorcising Spectres with Secure Compilers

(CROPPED TO FIT IN ARXIV'S SILLY LIMIT. SEE PDF FOR COMPLETE ABSTRACT.) We are the first to thoroughly explore a large space of formal secure compilation criteria based on robust property preservation, i.e., the preservation of properties…

As more attention is paid to security in the context of control systems and as attacks occur to real control systems throughout the world, it has become clear that some of the most nefarious attacks are those that evade detection. The term…

Proving secure compilation of partial programs typically requires back-translating an attack against the compiled program to an attack against the source program. To prove back-translation, one can syntactically translate the target…

The recent discovery of the Spectre and Meltdown attacks represents a watershed moment not just for the field of Computer Security, but also of Programming Languages. This paper explores speculative side-channel attacks and their…

In the domain of practical software protection against man-at-the-end attacks such as software reverse engineering and tampering, much of the scientific literature is plagued by the use of subpar methods to evaluate the protections'…

Whenever a bug occurs in a program, software developers assume that the code is flawed, not the compiler. In fact, if compilers should be correct, they are just normal software with their own bugs. Hard to find, errors in them have…

This article provides a tool for analyzing mechanisms that aim to achieve resilience against stealthy, or undetectable, attacks on cyber-physical systems (CPSs). We consider attackers who are able to corrupt all of the inputs and outputs of…

We describe Swivel, a new compiler framework for hardening WebAssembly (Wasm) against Spectre attacks. Outside the browser, Wasm has become a popular lightweight, in-process sandbox and is, for example, used in production to isolate…

Spectre, Meltdown, and related attacks have demonstrated that kernels, hypervisors, trusted execution environments, and browsers are prone to information disclosure through micro-architectural weaknesses. However, it remains unclear as to…

Irregular codes are bottlenecked by memory and communication latency. Decoupled access/execute (DAE) is a common technique to tackle this problem. It relies on the compiler to separate memory address generation from the rest of the program,…

This paper considers a method of coding the sensor outputs in order to detect stealthy false data injection attacks. An intelligent attacker can design a sequence of data injection to sensors and actuators that pass the state estimator and…

We present a new type of attack in which source code is maliciously encoded so that it appears different to a compiler and to the human eye. This attack exploits subtleties in text-encoding standards such as Unicode to produce source code…

Available purely software based code attestation protocols have recently been shown to be cheatable. In this work we propose to upload compressed instruction code to make the code attestation protocol robust against a so called compresssion…

This paper reports about the impact of compiler options on the resistance of cryptographic implementations against side channel analysis attacks. We evaluated four compiler option for six different FPGAs from Intel and Xilinx. In order to…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to assist developers with code, yet their implementations of cryptographic functionality often contain exploitable flaws. Minor design choices (e.g., static initialization vectors or…

Performance-enhancing mechanisms such as branch prediction, out-of-order execution, and return stack buffer (RSB) have been widely employed in today's modern processing units. Although successful in increasing the CPU performance,…

The recent Meltdown and Spectre attacks highlight the importance of automated verification techniques for identifying hardware security vulnerabilities. We have developed a tool for synthesizing microarchitecture-specific programs capable…

We systematize software side-channel attacks with a focus on vulnerabilities and countermeasures in the cryptographic implementations. Particularly, we survey past research literature to categorize vulnerable implementations, and identify…

Software security is of utmost importance for most software systems. Developers must systematically select, plan, design, implement, and especially, maintain and evolve security features -- functionalities to mitigate attacks or protect…

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…