Related papers: Provably Secure Isolation for Interruptible Enclav…
We propose a theory that can determine the lowest isolation level that can be allocated to each transaction program in an application in a mixed-isolation-level setting, to guarantee that all executions will be serializable and thus…
Recent work has shown that out-of-order and speculative execution mechanisms used to increase performance in the majority of processors expose the processors to critical attacks. These attacks, called Meltdown and Spectre, exploit the side…
Generating secure random numbers is a central problem in cryptography that needs a reliable source of enough computing entropy. Without enough entropy available - meaning no good source of secure random numbers - a device is susceptible to…
With the ubiquity of IoT devices there is a growing demand for confidentiality and integrity of data. Solutions based on reconfigurable logic (CPLD or FPGA) have certain advantages over ASIC and MCU/SoC alternatives. Programmable logic…
This paper evaluates new security threats due to the processor frontend in modern Intel processors. The root causes of the security threats are the multiple paths in the processor frontend that the micro-operations can take: through the…
Enclave deployments often fail to simultaneously be secure (e.g., resistant to side channel attacks), powerful (i.e., as fast as an off-the-shelf server), and flexible (i.e., unconstrained by development hurdles). In this paper, we present…
Encrypted computing is an emerging technology based on a processor that `works encrypted', taking encrypted inputs to encrypted outputs while data remains in encrypted form throughout. It aims to secure user data against possible insider…
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,…
Micro-controller units (MCUs) implement the de facto interface between the physical and digital worlds. As a consequence, they appear in a variety of sensing/actuation applications, from smart personal spaces to complex industrial control…
Following a sequence of hardware designs for a fully homomorphic crypto-processor - a general purpose processor that natively runs encrypted machine code on encrypted data in registers and memory, resulting in encrypted machine states -…
Intel software guard extensions (SGX) aims to provide an isolated execution environment, known as an enclave, for a user-level process to maximize its confidentiality and integrity. In this paper, we study how uninitialized data inside a…
Trusted executions environments (TEEs) such as Intel(R) SGX provide hardware-isolated execution areas in memory, called enclaves. By running only the most trusted application components in the enclave, TEEs enable developers to minimize the…
Spectre intrusions exploit speculative execution design vulnerabilities in modern processors. The attacks violate the principles of isolation in programs to gain unauthorized private user information. Current state-of-the-art detection…
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…
Microprocessors enable aggressive hardware virtualization by means of which multiple processes temporally execute on the system. These security-critical and ordinary processes interact with each other to assure application progress.…
We investigate the utility of augmenting a microprocessor with a single execution pipeline by adding a second copy of the execution pipeline in parallel with the existing one. The resulting dual-hardware-threaded microprocessor has two…
Beyond point solutions, the vision of edge computing is to enable web services to deploy their edge functions in a multi-tenant infrastructure present at the edge of mobile networks. However, edge functions can be rendered useless because…
Modern processors have suffered a deluge of threats exploiting branch instruction collisions inside the branch prediction unit (BPU), from eavesdropping on secret-related branch operations to triggering malicious speculative executions.…
As an emerging technique for confidential computing, trusted execution environment (TEE) receives a lot of attention. To better develop, deploy, and run secure applications on a TEE platform such as Intel's SGX, both academic and industrial…
The recent Spectre attacks has demonstrated the fundamental insecurity of current computer microarchitecture. The attacks use features like pipelining, out-of-order and speculation to extract arbitrary information about the memory contents…