Related papers: Speculative Interference Attacks: Breaking Invisib…
Modern out-of-order processors face speculative execution attacks. Despite various proposed software and hardware mitigations to prevent such attacks, new attacks keep arising from unknown vulnerabilities. Thus, a formal and rigorous…
Since the discovery of Spectre, a large number of hardware mechanisms for secure speculation has been proposed. Intuitively, more defensive mechanisms are less efficient but can securely execute a larger class of programs, while more…
Recent advancements in speculative decoding have demonstrated considerable speedup across a wide array of large language model (LLM) tasks. Speculative decoding inherently relies on sacrificing extra memory allocations to generate several…
This paper argues and shows that speculative vectorization, where a loop with rare or unknown memory dependencies are still vectorized, is fundamentally vulnerable and cannot be mitigated by existing defenses. We implement a simple proof of…
Accurate simulation techniques are indispensable to efficiently propose new memory or architectural organizations. As implementing new hardware concepts in real systems is often not feasible, cycle-accurate simulators employed together with…
Recent discovery of security attacks in advanced processors, known as Spectre and Meltdown, has resulted in high public alertness about security of hardware. The root cause of these attacks is information leakage across "covert channels"…
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…
Autonomous web navigation agents, which translate natural language instructions into sequences of browser actions, are increasingly deployed for complex tasks across e-commerce, information retrieval, and content discovery. Due to the…
We propose the concept of Speculative Execution for Visual Analytics and discuss its effectiveness for model exploration and optimization. Speculative Execution enables the automatic generation of alternative, competing model configurations…
Mainstream compilers implement different countermeasures to prevent specific classes of speculative execution attacks. Unfortunately, these countermeasures either lack formal guarantees or come with proofs restricted to speculative…
Machine learning systems are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where attackers manipulate model behavior through data tampering or architectural modifications. Traditional backdoor attacks involve injecting malicious samples with specific…
A new class of vulnerabilities related to speculative and out-of-order execution, fault-injection, and microarchitectural side channels rose to attention in 2018. The techniques behind the transient execution vulnerabilities were not new,…
Due to physical isolation as well as use of proprietary hardware and protocols, traditional real-time systems (RTS) were considered to be invulnerable to security breaches and external attacks. However, this assumption is being challenged…
Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are vulnerable to attacks targeting outgoing actuation commands that modify their physical behaviors. The limited resources in such systems, coupled with their stringent timing constraints, often prevents the…
Modern computer processors use microarchitectural optimization mechanisms to improve performance. As a downside, such optimizations are prone to introducing side-channel vulnerabilities. Speculative loading of memory, called prefetching, is…
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…
We develop and study new adversarial perturbations that enable an attacker to gain control over decisions in generic Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems including deep learning neural networks. In contrast to adversarial data modification,…
This paper considers a constrained discrete-time linear system subject to actuation attacks. The attacks are modelled as false data injections to the system, such that the total input (control input plus injection) satisfies hard input…
Timing-based side or covert channels in processor caches continue to present a threat to computer systems, and they are the key to many of the recent Spectre and Meltdown attacks. Based on improvements to an existing three-step model for…
This paper introduces Okapi, a new hardware/software cross-layer architecture designed to mitigate Transient Execution Side Channel attacks, including Spectre variants, in modern computing systems. Okapi provides a hardware basis for secure…