Related papers: MuonTrap: Preventing Cross-Domain Spectre-Like Att…

Caches have been exploited to leak secret information due to the different times they take to handle memory accesses. Cache timing attacks include non-speculative cache side and covert channel attacks and cache-based speculative execution…

Speculative execution attacks undermine the security of constant-time programming, the standard technique used to prevent microarchitectural side channels in security-sensitive software such as cryptographic code. Constant-time code must…

We present Janus, a compiler-based security framework that mitigates transient execution attacks like Spectre and control-flow hijacking on ARM64 platforms. Janus integrates speculative execution and control flow dependencies with PA…

This paper argues and shows that speculative vectorization, where a loop with rare or unknown memory dependencies are still vectorized, is fundamentally vulnerable and cannot be mitigated by existing defenses. We implement a simple proof of…

Transient execution side-channel attacks, such as Spectre, have been shown to break almost all isolation primitives. We introduce a new security property we call relaxed microarchitectural isolation (RMI) that allows sensitive programs that…

The prevalence of memory corruption bugs in the past decades resulted in numerous defenses, such as stack canaries, control flow integrity (CFI), and memory safe languages. These defenses can prevent entire classes of vulnerabilities, and…

We propose using reinforcement learning to address the challenges of discovering microarchitectural vulnerabilities, such as Spectre and Meltdown, which exploit subtle interactions in modern processors. Traditional methods like random…

Speculative backpropagation has emerged as a promising technique to accelerate the training of neural networks by overlapping the forward and backward passes. Leveraging speculative weight updates when error gradients fall within a specific…

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…

Cache side channel attacks are increasingly alarming in modern processors due to the recent emergence of Spectre and Meltdown attacks. A typical attack performs intentional cache access and manipulates cache states to leak secrets by…

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…

Whenever modern CPUs encounter a conditional branch for which the condition cannot be evaluated yet, they predict the likely branch target and speculatively execute code. Such pipelining is key to optimizing runtime performance and is…

This paper provides the first systematic analysis of a synergistic threat model encompassing memory corruption vulnerabilities and microarchitectural side-channel vulnerabilities. We study speculative shield bypass attacks that leverage…

Modern microprocessors depend on speculative execution, creating vulnerabilities that enable transient execution attacks. Prior defenses target speculative data leakage but overlook false dependencies from partial address aliasing, where…

Speculative vulnerabilities such as Spectre and Meltdown expose speculative execution state that can be exploited to leak information across security domains via side-channels. Such vulnerabilities often stay undetected for a long time as…

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,…

Spectre vulnerabilities violate our fundamental assumptions about architectural abstractions, allowing attackers to steal sensitive data despite previously state-of-the-art countermeasures. To defend against Spectre, developers of…

Distributed Complex Event Processing (DCEP) is a paradigm to infer the occurrence of complex situations in the surrounding world from basic events like sensor readings. In doing so, DCEP operators detect event patterns on their incoming…

LLM serving platforms are increasingly deployed as multi-model cloud systems, where user demand is often long-tailed: a few popular large models receive most requests, while many smaller tail models remain underutilized. We propose…

The Spectre speculative side-channel attacks pose formidable threats for security. Research has shown that code following the cryptographic constant-time discipline can be efficiently protected against Spectre v1 using a selective variant…