Related papers: V0LTpwn: Attacking x86 Processor Integrity from So…
This paper presents SgxPectre Attacks that exploit the recently disclosed CPU bugs to subvert the confidentiality and integrity of SGX enclaves. Particularly, we show that when branch prediction of the enclave code can be influenced by…
Embedded software is developed under the assumption that hardware execution is always correct. Fault attacks break and exploit that assumption. Through the careful introduction of targeted faults, an adversary modifies the control-flow or…
The transient-execution attack Meltdown leaks sensitive information by transiently accessing inaccessible data during out-of-order execution. Although Meltdown is fixed in hardware for recent CPU generations, most currently-deployed CPUs…
We introduce a new timing side-channel attack on Intel CPU processors. Our Frontal attack exploits timing differences that arise from how the CPU frontend fetches and processes instructions while being interrupted. In particular, we observe…
Recently, out-of-order execution, an important performance optimization in modern high-end processors, has been revealed to pose a significant security threat, allowing information leaks across security domains. In particular, the Meltdown…
Intel has introduced a trusted computing technology, Intel Software Guard Extension (SGX), which provides an isolated and secure execution environment called enclave for a user program without trusting any privilege software (e.g., an…
Application security traditionally strongly relies upon security of the underlying operating system. However, operating systems often fall victim to software attacks, compromising security of applications as well. To overcome this…
Modern CPU architectures offer strong isolation guarantees towards user applications in the form of enclaves. For instance, Intel's threat model for SGX assumes fully trusted enclaves, yet there is an ongoing debate on whether this threat…
Modern processors can offer hardware primitives that allow a process to run in isolation. These primitives implement a trusted execution environment (TEE) in which a program can run such that the integrity and confidentiality of its…
In early 2018, Meltdown first showed how to read arbitrary kernel memory from user space by exploiting side-effects from transient instructions. While this attack has been mitigated through stronger isolation boundaries between user and…
Integrity is critical for maintaining system security, as it ensures that only genuine software is loaded onto a machine. Although confidential virtual machines (CVMs) function within isolated environments separate from the host, it is…
In modern computer systems, user processes are isolated from each other by the operating system and the hardware. Additionally, in a cloud scenario it is crucial that the hypervisor isolates tenants from other tenants that are co-located on…
AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) offers protection mechanisms for virtual machines in untrusted environments through memory and register encryption. To separate security-sensitive operations from software executing on the main x86…
Intel SGX is known to be vulnerable to a class of practical attacks exploiting memory access pattern side-channels, notably page-fault attacks and cache timing attacks. A promising hardening scheme is to wrap applications in hardware…
Fault attacks enable adversaries to manipulate the control-flow of security-critical applications. By inducing targeted faults into the CPU, the software's call graph can be escaped and the control-flow can be redirected to arbitrary…
Exceptions are a commodity hardware functionality which is central to multi-tasking OSes as well as event-driven user applications. Normally, the OS assists the user application by lifting the semantics of exceptions received from hardware…
Fault injection attacks represent a class of threats that can compromise embedded systems across multiple layers of abstraction, such as system software, instruction set architecture (ISA), microarchitecture, and physical implementation.…
In this paper, we explore a new, yet critical, side-channel attack against Intel Software Guard Extension (SGX), called a branch shadowing attack, which can reveal fine-grained control flows (i.e., each branch) of an enclave program running…
Recent discovery of security attacks in advanced processors, known as Spectre and Meltdown, has resulted in high public alertness about security of hardware. The root cause of these attacks is information leakage across "covert channels"…
Existing tools to detect side-channel attacks on Intel SGX are grounded on the observation that attacks affect the performance of the victim application. As such, all detection tools monitor the potential victim and raise an alarm if the…