Related papers: Speculative Leakage in ARM Cortex-A53

The efficacy of address space layout randomization has been formally demonstrated in a shared-memory model by Abadi et al., contingent on specific assumptions about victim programs. However, modern operating systems, implementing layout…

In this paper, we present NetSpectre, a generic remote Spectre variant 1 attack. For this purpose, we demonstrate the first access-driven remote Evict+Reload cache attack over network, leaking 15 bits per hour. Beyond retrofitting existing…

Security critical software, e.g., OpenSSL, comes with numerous side-channel leakages left unpatched due to a lack of resources or experts. The situation will only worsen as the pace of code development accelerates, with developers relying…

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.…

The security of FPGAs is a crucial topic, as any vulnerability within the hardware can have severe consequences, if they are used in a secure design. Since FPGA designs are encoded in a bitstream, securing the bitstream is of the utmost…

Screaming-channel attacks enable Electromagnetic (EM) Side-Channel Attacks (SCAs) at larger distances due to higher EM leakage energies than traditional SCAs, relaxing the requirement of close access to the victim. This attack can be…

Side-channel attacks on shared hardware resources increasingly threaten confidentiality, especially with the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs). In this work, we introduce Spill The Beans, a novel application of cache side-channels to…

The code generation modules inside modern compilers such as GCC and LLVM, which use a limited number of CPU registers to store a large number of program variables, may introduce side-channel leaks even in software equipped with…

FPGA-based hardware accelerators are becoming increasingly popular due to their versatility, customizability, energy efficiency, constant latency, and scalability. FPGAs can be tailored to specific algorithms, enabling efficient hardware…

Modern computer architectures rely on caches to reduce the latency gap between the CPU and main memory. While indispensable for performance, caches pose a serious threat to security because they leak information about memory access patterns…

Microcode is an abstraction layer used by modern x86 processors that interprets user-visible CISC instructions to hardware-internal RISC instructions. The capability to update x86 microcode enables a vendor to modify CPU behavior in-field,…

In a zero-trust fabless paradigm, designers are increasingly concerned about hardware-based attacks on the semiconductor supply chain. Logic locking is a design-for-trust method that adds extra key-controlled gates in the circuits to…

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,…

Frontier AI developers are relying on layers of safeguards to protect against catastrophic misuse of AI systems. Anthropic and OpenAI guard their latest Opus 4 model and GPT-5 models using such defense pipelines, and other frontier…

In quantitative information flow we say that program $Q$ is "at least as secure as" $P$ just when the amount of secret information flowing from $Q$ is never more than flows from $P$, with of course a suitable quantification of "flow". This…

The enormous amount of code required to design modern hardware implementations often leads to critical vulnerabilities being overlooked. Especially vulnerabilities that compromise the confidentiality of sensitive data, such as cryptographic…

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are being explored to emulate the astounding capabilities of human brain that can learn and compute functions robustly and efficiently with noisy spiking activities. A variety of spiking neuron models have…

Hardware-software leakage contracts have emerged as a formalism for specifying side-channel security guarantees of modern processors, yet verifying that a complex hardware design complies with its contract remains a major challenge. While…

Timing channels enable data leakage that threatens the security of computer systems, from cloud platforms to smartphones and browsers executing untrusted third-party code. Preventing unauthorised information flow is a core duty of the…

Power side-channel attacks are a very effective cryptanalysis technique that can infer secret keys of security ICs by monitoring the power consumption. Since the emergence of practical attacks in the late 90s, they have been a major threat…