Related papers: An Exploratory Analysis of Microcode as a Building…
Embedded software used in industrial systems frequently relies on data that ensures the correct and efficient operation of these systems. Thus, companies invest considerable resources in fine-tuning this data, making it their valuable…
Discovering new vulnerabilities and implementing security and privacy measures are important to protect systems and data against physical attacks. One such vulnerability is impedance, an inherent property of a device that can be exploited…
The hardware computing landscape is changing. What used to be distributed systems can now be found on a chip with highly configurable, diverse, specialized and general purpose units. Such Systems-on-a-Chip (SoC) are used to control today's…
Recent years have brought microarchitectural security intothe spotlight, proving that modern CPUs are vulnerable toseveral classes of microarchitectural attacks. These attacksbypass the basic isolation primitives provided by the…
We present uSpectre, a new class of transient execution attacks that exploit microcode branch mispredictions to transiently leak sensitive data. We find that many long-known and recently-discovered transient execution attacks, which were…
To counter man-at-the-end attacks such as reverse engineering and tampering, software is often protected with techniques that require support modules to be linked into the application. It is well-known, however, that attackers can exploit…
Logic Encryption is one of the most popular hardware security techniques which can prevent IP piracy and illegal IC overproduction. It introduces obfuscation by inserting some extra hardware into a design to hide its functionality from…
Timing-based side and covert channels in processor caches continue to be a threat to modern computers. This work shows for the first time a systematic, large-scale analysis of Arm devices and the detailed results of attacks the processors…
Modern processors use branch prediction and speculative execution to maximize performance. For example, if the destination of a branch depends on a memory value that is in the process of being read, CPUs will try guess the destination and…
Intrusion detection into computer networks has become one of the most important issues in cybersecurity. Attackers keep on researching and coding to discover new vulnerabilities to penetrate information security system. In consequence…
With increasingly sophisticated cyber-adversaries able to access a wider repertoire of mechanisms to implant malware such as ransomware, CPU/GPU keyloggers, and stealthy kernel rootkits, there is an urgent need for techniques to detect and…
The run-time electromagnetic (EM) emanation of microprocessors presents a side-channel that leaks the confidentiality of the applications running on them. Many recent works have demonstrated successful attacks leveraging such side-channels…
Software protection aims at safeguarding assets embedded in software by preventing and delaying reverse engineering and tampering attacks. This paper presents an architecture and supporting tool flow to renew parts of native applications…
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…
Control-flow leakage (CFL) attacks enable an attacker to expose control-flow decisions of a victim program via side-channel observations. Linearization (i.e., elimination) of secret-dependent control flow is the main countermeasure against…
A crucial activity in software maintenance and evolution is the comprehension of the changes performed by developers, when they submit a pull request and/or perform a commit on the repository. Typically, code changes are represented in the…
Micro-architectural attacks use information leaked through shared resources to break hardware-enforced isolation. These attacks have been used to steal private information ranging from cryptographic keys to privileged Operating System (OS)…
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…
There is a long history of side channels in the memory hierarchy of modern CPUs. Especially the cache side channel is widely used in the context of transient execution attacks and covert channels. Therefore, many secure cache architectures…
Firmware refers to device read-only resident code which includes microcode and macro-instruction -level routines. For Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices without an operating system, firmware includes all the necessary instructions on how such…