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PCBs are the core components for the devices ranging from the consumer electronics to military applications. Due to the accessibility of the PCBs, they are vulnerable to the attacks such as probing, eavesdropping, and reverse engineering.…
Meltdown and Spectre exploit microarchitectural changes the CPU makes during transient out-of-order execution. Using side-channel techniques, these attacks enable leaking arbitrary data from memory. As state-of-the-art software mitigations…
Attacks on the microarchitecture of modern processors have become a practical threat to security and privacy in desktop and cloud computing. Recently, cache attacks have successfully been demonstrated on ARM based mobile devices, suggesting…
Speculative attacks are still an active threat today that, even if initially focused on the x86 platform, reach across all modern hardware architectures. RISC-V is a newly proposed open instruction set architecture that has seen traction…
Modern hardware systems are composed of a variety of third-party Intellectual Property (IP) cores to implement their overall functionality. Since hardware design is a globalized process involving various (untrusted) stakeholders, a secure…
How will future microarchitectures impact the security of existing cryptographic implementations? As we cannot keep reducing the size of transistors, chip vendors have started developing new microarchitectural optimizations to speed up…
Transient execution attacks utilize micro-architectural covert channels to leak secrets that should not have been accessible during logical program execution. Commonly used micro-architectural covert channels are those that leave lasting…
Today, leveraging the enormous modular power, diversity and flexibility of manycore systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) requires careful orchestration of complex resources, a task left to low-level software, e.g. hypervisors. In current architectures,…
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,…
The transient-execution attack Meltdown leaks sensitive information by transiently accessing inaccessible data during out-of-order execution. Although Meltdown is fixed in hardware for recent CPU generations, most currently-deployed CPUs…
Security is an important facet of integrated circuit design for many applications. IP privacy and Trojan insertion are growing threats as circuit fabrication in advanced nodes almost inevitably relies on untrusted foundries. A proposed…
Dynamic partial reconfiguration enables multi-tenancy in cloud-based FPGAs, which presents security challenges for tenants, IPs, and data. Malicious users can exploit FPGAs for remote side-channel attacks (SCAs), and shared on-chip…
Code protections aim at blocking (or at least delaying) reverse engineering and tampering attacks to critical assets within programs. Knowing the way hackers understand protected code and perform attacks is important to achieve a stronger…
Code obfuscation is a popular approach to turn program comprehension and analysis harder, with the aim of mitigating threats related to malicious reverse engineering and code tampering. However, programming languages that compile to high…
Confidential Computing (CC) has received increasing attention in recent years as a mechanism to protect user data from untrusted operating systems (OSes). Existing CC solutions hide confidential memory from the OS and/or encrypt it to…
Covert channels are communication channels used by attackers to transmit information from a compromised system when the access control policy of the system does not allow doing so. Previous work has shown that CPU frequency scaling can be…
Binary analysis is traditionally used in the realm of malware detection. However, the same technique may be employed by an attacker to analyze the original binaries in order to reverse engineer them and extract exploitable weaknesses. When…
In this work we present the Secure Machine, SeM for short, a CPU architecture extension for secure computing. SeM uses a small amount of in-chip additional hardware that monitors key communication channels inside the CPU chip, and only acts…
Modern applications are increasingly advanced and complex, and inevitably contain exploitable software bugs despite the ongoing efforts. The applications today often involve processing of sensitive information. However, the lack of…
Blockchain has recently been depicted as a secure protocol for information exchange in cyber-physical microgrids. However, it is still found vulnerable to consensus manipulation attacks. These stealth attacks are often difficult to detect…