Related papers: Provably Secure Isolation for Interruptible Enclav…
Modern processors use branch prediction and speculative execution to maximize performance. For example, if the destination of a branch depends on a memory value that is in the process of being read, CPUs will try guess the destination and…
Besides Intel's SGX technology, there are long-running discussions on how trusted computing technologies can be used to cloak malware. Past research showed example methods of malicious activities utilising Flicker, Trusted Platform Module,…
Shared cache resources in multi-core processors are vulnerable to cache side-channel attacks. Recently proposed defenses have their own caveats: Randomization-based defenses are vulnerable to the evolving attack algorithms besides relying…
Security and privacy concerns in computer systems have grown in importance with the ubiquity of connected devices. TEEs provide security guarantees based on cryptographic constructs built in hardware. Intel software guard extensions (SGX),…
To ensure secure and trustworthy execution of applications, vendors frequently embed trusted execution environments into their systems. Here, applications are protected from adversaries, including a malicious operating system. TEEs are…
Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX) introduced new instructions to switch the processor to enclave mode which protects it from introspection. While the enclave mode strongly protects the memory and the state of the processor, it cannot…
Recent years have brought microarchitectural security intothe spotlight, proving that modern CPUs are vulnerable toseveral classes of microarchitectural attacks. These attacksbypass the basic isolation primitives provided by the…
Security architectures providing Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) have been an appealing research subject for a wide range of computer systems, from low-end embedded devices to powerful cloud servers. The goal of these architectures is…
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…
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…
Recent results have shown the usefulness of tamper-proof hardware tokens as a setup assumption for building UC-secure two-party computation protocols, thus providing broad security guarantees and allowing the use of such protocols as…
Modern multi-core processors share cache resources for maximum cache utilization and performance gains. However, this leaves the cache vulnerable to side-channel attacks, where timing differences in shared cache behavior are exploited to…
Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) is a promising hardware-based technology for protecting sensitive computations from potentially compromised system software. However, recent research has shown that SGX is vulnerable to branch-shadowing…
Efficient cloud computing relies on in-process isolation to optimize performance by running workloads within a single process. Without heavy-weight process isolation, memory safety errors pose a significant security threat by allowing an…
Demand for data-intensive workloads and confidential computing are the prominent research directions shaping the future of cloud computing. Computer architectures are evolving to accommodate the computing of large data better. Protecting…
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…
Imagine a group of citizens willing to collectively contribute their personal data for the common good to produce socially useful information, resulting from data analytics or machine learning computations. Sharing raw personal data with 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…
Microarchitectural attacks exploit the abstraction gap between the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) and how instructions are actually executed by processors to compromise the confidentiality and integrity of a system. To secure systems…
Hardware-supported security mechanisms like Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) provide strong security guarantees, which are particularly relevant in cloud settings. However, their reliance on physical hardware conflicts with cloud…