Related papers: Bypassing memory safety mechanisms through specula…
Speculative execution which is used pervasively in modern CPUs can leave side effects in the processor caches and other structures even when the speculated instructions do not commit and their direct effect is not visible. The recent…
Speculative execution is a hardware optimisation technique where a processor, while waiting on the completion of a computation required for an instruction, continues to execute later instructions based on a predicted value of the pending…
Spectre attacks disclosed in early 2018 expose data leakage scenarios via cache side channels. Specifically, speculatively executed paths due to branch mis-prediction may bring secret data into the cache which are then exposed via cache…
Hardware caches are essential performance optimization features in modern processors to reduce the effective memory access time. Unfortunately, they are also the prime targets for attacks on computer processors because they are…
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…
The recent discovery of the Spectre and Meltdown attacks represents a watershed moment not just for the field of Computer Security, but also of Programming Languages. This paper explores speculative side-channel attacks and their…
Computing systems, including real-time embedded systems, are becoming increasingly connected to allow for more advanced and safer operation. Such embedded systems are resource-constrained, such as lower processing capabilities, as compared…
Control flow integrity (CFI) has received significant attention in the community to combat control hijacking attacks in the presence of memory corruption vulnerabilities. The challenges in creating a practical CFI has resulted in the…
Smart contracts are frequently vulnerable to control-flow attacks based on confused deputies, reentrancy, and incorrect error handling. These attacks exploit the complexity of interactions among multiple possibly unknown contracts. Existing…
Memory corruption vulnerabilities remain one of the most severe threats to software security. They often allow attackers to achieve arbitrary code execution by redirecting a vulnerable program's control flow. While Control Flow Integrity…
The recent Spectre attacks have demonstrated that modern microarchitectural optimizations can make software insecure. These attacks use features like pipelining, out-of-order and speculation to extract information about the memory contents…
Speculative attacks such as Spectre can leak secret information without being discovered by the operating system. Speculative execution vulnerabilities are finicky and deep in the sense that to exploit them, it requires intensive manual…
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…
Control-flow hijacking attacks are used to perform malicious com-putations. Current solutions for assessing the attack surface afteracontrol flow integrity(CFI) policy was applied can measure onlyindirect transfer averages in the best case…
Attacks like Spectre abuse speculative execution, one of the key performance optimizations of modern CPUs. Recently, several testing tools have emerged to automatically detect speculative leaks in commercial (black-box) CPUs. However, the…
Manipulations of return addresses on the stack are the basis for a variety of attacks on programs written in memory unsafe languages. Dual stack schemes for protecting return addresses promise an efficient and effective defense against such…
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…
New speculation-based attacks that affect large numbers of modern systems are disclosed regularly. Currently, CPU vendors regularly fall back to heavy-handed mitigations like using barriers or enforcing strict programming guidelines…
Modern processors employ different prediction mechanisms to speculate over different kinds of instructions. Attackers can exploit these prediction mechanisms simultaneously in order to trigger leaks about speculatively-accessed data. Thus,…
Modern computer processors use microarchitectural optimization mechanisms to improve performance. As a downside, such optimizations are prone to introducing side-channel vulnerabilities. Speculative loading of memory, called prefetching, is…