Related papers: Hardware-Software Contracts for Secure Speculation
Since the advent of Spectre attacks, researchers and practitioners have developed a range of hardware and software measures to counter transient execution attacks. A prime example of such mitigation is speculative load hardening in LLVM,…
Software privacy provides the ability to limit data access to unauthorized parties. Privacy is achieved through different means, such as implementing GDPR into software applications. However, previous research revealed that the lack of poor…
In recent years, several hardware-based countermeasures proposed to mitigate Spectre attacks have been shown to be insecure. To enable the development of effective secure speculation countermeasures, we need easy-to-use tools that can…
Spectre, Meltdown, and related attacks have demonstrated that kernels, hypervisors, trusted execution environments, and browsers are prone to information disclosure through micro-architectural weaknesses. However, it remains unclear as to…
Spectre attacks and their many subsequent variants are a new vulnerability class affecting modern CPUs. The attacks rely on the ability to misguide speculative execution, generally by exploiting the branch prediction structures, to execute…
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…
We present a new approach to automated reasoning about higher-order programs by endowing symbolic execution with a notion of higher-order, symbolic values. Our approach is sound and relatively complete with respect to a first-order solver…
Recent security vulnerabilities that target speculative execution (e.g., Spectre) present a significant challenge for processor design. The highly publicized vulnerability uses speculative execution to learn victim secrets by changing cache…
Smart contracts are the building blocks of the "code is law" paradigm: the smart contract's code indisputably describes how its assets are to be managed - once it is created, its code is typically immutable. Faulty smart contracts present…
Microarchitectural attacks represent a challenging and persistent threat to modern processors, exploiting inherent design vulnerabilities in processors to leak sensitive information or compromise systems. Of particular concern is the…
There is a growing need for hardware-software contracts which precisely define the implications of microarchitecture on software security-i.e., security contracts. It is our view that such contracts should explicitly account for…
Smart contracts are appealing because they are self-executing business agreements between parties with the predefined and immutable obligations and rights. However, as with all software, smart contracts may contain vulnerabilities because…
As cloud providers push multi-tenancy to new levels to meet growing scalability demands, ensuring that externally developed untrusted microservices will preserve tenant isolation has become a high priority. Developers, in turn, lack a means…
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…
We propose a new formal criterion for evaluating secure compilation schemes for unsafe languages, expressing end-to-end security guarantees for software components that may become compromised after encountering undefined behavior---for…
To ensure programs do not leak private data, we often want to be able to provide formal guarantees ensuring such data is handled correctly. Often, we cannot keep such data secret entirely; instead programmers specify how private data may be…
Smart contracts are regarded as one of the most promising and appealing notions in blockchain technology. Their self-enforcing and event-driven features make some online activities possible without a trusted third party. Nevertheless,…
With the increasing adoption of smart contracts, ensuring their security has become a critical concern. Numerous vulnerabilities and attacks have been identified and exploited, resulting in significant financial losses. In response,…
Speculative vulnerabilities such as Spectre and Meltdown expose speculative execution state that can be exploited to leak information across security domains via side-channels. Such vulnerabilities often stay undetected for a long time as…
Smart Contracts are programs running logic in the Blockchain network by executing operations through immutable transactions. The Blockchain network validates such transactions, storing them into sequential blocks of which integrity is…