Related papers: InSpectre: Breaking and Fixing Microarchitectural …

Attackers can access sensitive information of programs by exploiting the side-effects of speculatively-executed instructions using Spectre attacks. To mitigate theses attacks, popular compilers deployed a wide range of countermeasures. The…

Transient execution attacks that exploit speculation have raised significant concerns in computer systems. Typically, branch predictors are leveraged to trigger mis-speculation in transient execution attacks. In this work, we demonstrate a…

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…

Spectre attacks exploit microprocessor speculative execution to read and transmit forbidden data outside the attacker's trust domain and sandbox. Recent hardware schemes allow potentially-unsafe speculative accesses but prevent the secret's…

Out-of-order speculation, a technique ubiquitous since the early 1990s, remains a fundamental security flaw. Via attacks such as Spectre and Meltdown, an attacker can trick a victim, in an otherwise entirely correct program, into leaking…

Speculative execution attacks leverage the speculative and out-of-order execution features in modern computer processors to access secret data or execute code that should not be executed. Secret information can then be leaked through a…

Research on transient execution attacks including Spectre and Meltdown showed that exception or branch misprediction events might leave secret-dependent traces in the CPU's microarchitectural state. This observation led to a proliferation…

Side-channel attacks such as Spectre that utilize speculative execution to steal application secrets pose a significant threat to modern computing systems. While program transformations can mitigate some Spectre attacks, more advanced…

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 exploit speculative execution to leak sensitive information. In the last few years, a number of static side-channel detectors have been proposed to detect cache leakage in the presence of speculative execution. However,…

Speculation is key to achieving high CPU performance, yet it enables risks like Spectre attacks which remain a significant challenge to mitigate without incurring substantial performance overheads. These attacks typically unfold in three…

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…

The Spectre family of speculative execution attacks have required a rethinking of formal methods for security. Approaches based on operational speculative semantics have made initial inroads towards finding vulnerable code and validating…

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…

CPUs provide isolation mechanisms like virtualization and privilege levels to protect software. Yet these focus on architectural isolation while typically overlooking microarchitectural side channels, exemplified by Meltdown and Foreshadow.…

A recent discovery of a new class of microarchitectural attacks called Spectre picked up the attention of the security community as these attacks can circumvent many traditional mechanisms of defense. One of the attacks---Bounds Check…

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…

With the exponential rise in the use of cloud services, smart devices, and IoT devices, advanced cyber attacks have become increasingly sophisticated and ubiquitous. Furthermore, the rapid evolution of computing architectures and memory…

Recent attacks have broken process isolation by exploiting microarchitectural side channels that allow indirect access to shared microarchitectural state. Enclaves strengthen the process abstraction to restore isolation guarantees. We…

Modern out-of-order CPUs heavily rely on speculative execution for performance optimization, with branch prediction serving as a cornerstone to minimize stalls and maximize efficiency. Whenever shared branch prediction resources lack proper…