Related papers: Automatically Eliminating Speculative Leaks from C…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

With their widespread popularity, web services have become the main targets of various cyberattacks. Existing traffic anomaly detection approaches focus on flow-level attacks, yet fail to recognize behavior-level attacks, which appear…

Practical attacks that exploit speculative execution can leak confidential information via microarchitectural side channels. The recently-demonstrated Spectre attacks leverage speculative loads which circumvent access checks to read…

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…

Speculative execution enhances processor performance by predicting intermediate results and executing instructions based on these predictions. However, incorrect predictions can lead to security vulnerabilities, as speculative instructions…

Deployed large language models (LLMs) often rely on speculative decoding, a technique that generates and verifies multiple candidate tokens in parallel, to improve throughput and latency. In this work, we reveal a new side-channel whereby…

Since the advent of SPECTRE, a number of countermeasures have been proposed and deployed. Rigorously reasoning about their effectiveness, however, requires a well-defined notion of security against speculative execution attacks, which has…

We present CureSpec, the first model-checking based framework for automatic repair of programs with respect to information leaks in the presence of side-channels and speculative execution. CureSpec is based on formal models of attacker…

Speculative decoding is widely used in accelerating large language model (LLM) inference. In this work, we focus on the online draft model selection problem in speculative decoding. We design an algorithm that provably competes with the…

This work presents a new tool to verify the correctness of cryptographic implementations with respect to cache attacks. Our methodology discovers vulnerabilities that are hard to find with other techniques, observed as exploitable leakage.…

Speculative decoding has emerged as a promising approach to accelerate autoregressive inference in large language models (LLMs). Self-draft methods, which leverage the base LLM itself for speculation, avoid the overhead of auxiliary draft…

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…

CPU cache is a limited but crucial storage component in modern processors, whereas the cache timing side-channel may inadvertently leak information through the physically measurable timing variance. Speculative execution, an essential…

Large Language Models (LLMs) enable a new ecosystem with many downstream applications, called LLM applications, with different natural language processing tasks. The functionality and performance of an LLM application highly depend on its…

Speculative execution techniques have been a cornerstone of modern processors to improve instruction-level parallelism. However, recent studies showed that this kind of techniques could be exploited by attackers to leak secret data via…

Authors of cryptographic software are well aware that their code should not leak secrets through its timing behavior, and, until 2018, they believed that following industry-standard constant-time coding guidelines was sufficient. However,…