Related papers: An Exploratory Analysis of Microcode as a Building…

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…

We introduce a new timing side-channel attack on Intel CPU processors. Our Frontal attack exploits timing differences that arise from how the CPU frontend fetches and processes instructions while being interrupted. In particular, we observe…

Applications written in low-level languages without type or memory safety are especially prone to memory corruption. Attackers gain code execution capabilities through such applications despite all currently deployed defenses by exploiting…

Microarchitectural attacks compromise security by exploiting software-visible artifacts of microarchitectural optimizations such as caches and speculative execution. Defending against such attacks at the software level requires an…

Virtualization promises significant benefits in security, efficiency, dependability, and cost. Achieving these benefits depends upon the reliability of the underlying virtual machine monitors (hypervisors). This paper describes an ongoing…

Application compartmentalization and privilege separation are our primary weapons against ever-increasing security threats and privacy concerns on connected devices. Despite significant progress, it is still challenging to privilege…

The development process of microcontroller firmware often involves multiple parties. In such a scenario, the Intellectual Property (IP) is not protected against adversarial developers which have unrestricted access to the firmware binary.…

Memory corruption vulnerabilities are still a severe threat for software systems. To thwart the exploitation of such vulnerabilities, many different kinds of defenses have been proposed in the past. Most prominently, Control-Flow Integrity…

Designers use third-party intellectual property (IP) cores and outsource various steps in the integrated circuit (IC) design and manufacturing flow. As a result, security vulnerabilities have been rising. This is forcing IC designers and…

Modern circuits face various threats like reverse engineering, theft of intellectual property (IP), side-channel attacks, etc. Here, we present a novel approach for IP protection based on logic encryption (LE). Unlike established schemes…

New hardware primitives such as Intel SGX secure a user-level process in presence of an untrusted or compromised OS. Such "enclaved execution" systems are vulnerable to several side-channels, one of which is the page fault channel. In this…

Secret keys can be extracted from the power consumption or electromagnetic emanations of unprotected devices. Traditional counter-measures have limited scope of protection, and impose several restrictions on how sensitive data must be…

Embedded systems are parts of our daily life and used in many fields. They can be found in smartphones or in modern cars including GPS, light/rain sensors and other electronic assistance mechanisms. These systems may handle sensitive data…

Cyber-physical microgrids are vulnerable to rootkit attacks that manipulate system dynamics to create instabilities in the network. Rootkits tend to hide their access level within microgrid system components to launch sudden attacks that…

Cloud computing is a convenient model for processing data remotely. However, users must trust their cloud provider with the confidentiality and integrity of the stored and processed data. To increase the protection of virtual machines, AMD…

CPU caches introduce variations into the execution time of programs that can be exploited by adversaries to recover private information about users or cryptographic keys. Establishing the security of countermeasures against this threat…

Advances in reverse engineering make it challenging to deploy any on-chip information in a way that is hidden from a determined attacker. A variety of techniques have been proposed for design obfuscation including look-alike cells in which…

For years, the open-source RISC-V instruction set has been driving innovation in processor design, spanning from high-end cores to low-cost or low-power cores. After a decade of evolution, RISC architectures are now as mature as the CISC…

Fault injection attacks represent a class of threats that can compromise embedded systems across multiple layers of abstraction, such as system software, instruction set architecture (ISA), microarchitecture, and physical implementation.…

Timing channels are information flows, encoded in the relative timing of events, that bypass the system's protection mechanisms. Any microarchitectural state that depends on execution history and affects the rate of progress of later…