Related papers: Speculative Dereferencing of Registers:Reviving Fo…
Recent security vulnerabilities that target speculative execution (e.g., Spectre) present a significant challenge for processor design. The highly publicized vulnerability uses speculative execution to learn victim secrets by changing cache…
In this paper, we reveal the existence of a new class of prefetcher, the XPT prefetcher, in the modern Intel processors which has never been officially documented. It speculatively issues a load, bypassing last-level cache (LLC) lookups,…
Double-fetch bugs are a special type of race condition, where an unprivileged execution thread is able to change a memory location between the time-of-check and time-of-use of a privileged execution thread. If an unprivileged attacker…
A recent discovery of a new class of microarchitectural attacks called Spectre picked up the attention of the security community as these attacks can circumvent many traditional mechanisms of defense. One of the attacks---Bounds Check…
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…
Implementations of cryptographic libraries have been scrutinized for secret-dependent execution behavior exploitable by microarchitectural side-channel attacks. To prevent unintended leakages, most libraries moved to constant-time…
Membership inference attacks aim to infer whether a data record has been used to train a target model by observing its predictions. In sensitive domains such as healthcare, this can constitute a severe privacy violation. In this work we…
Register Files (RFs) are the most frequently accessed memories in a microprocessor for fast and efficient computation and control logic. Segment registers and control registers are especially critical for maintaining the CPU mode of…
Rowhammer is a critical vulnerability in dynamic random access memory (DRAM) that continues to pose a significant threat to various systems. However, we find that conventional load-based attacks are becoming highly ineffective on the most…
Caches only exploit spatial and temporal locality in a set of address referenced in a program. Due to dynamic construction of linked data-structures, they are difficult to cache as the spatial locality between the nodes is highly dependent…
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…
Whenever modern CPUs encounter a conditional branch for which the condition cannot be evaluated yet, they predict the likely branch target and speculatively execute code. Such pipelining is key to optimizing runtime performance and is…
The security of a computer system depends on OS kernel protection. It is crucial to reveal and inspect new attacks on kernel data, as these are used by hackers. The purpose of this paper is to continue research into attacks on dynamically…
Modern processor designs use a variety of microarchitectural methods to achieve high performance. Unfortunately, new side-channels have often been uncovered that exploit these enhanced designs. One area that has received little attention…
The recent Spectre attacks exploit speculative execution, a pervasively used feature of modern microprocessors, to allow the exfiltration of sensitive data across protection boundaries. In this paper, we introduce a new Spectre-class attack…
Backend enrichment is now widely deployed in sensitive domains such as product recommendation pipelines, healthcare, and finance, where models are trained on confidential data and retrieve private features whose values influence inference…
Speculative execution is an optimization technique that has been part of CPUs for over a decade. It predicts the outcome and target of branch instructions to avoid stalling the execution pipeline. However, until recently, the security…
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…
Speculative execution which is used pervasively in modern CPUs can leave side effects in the processor caches and other structures even when the speculated instructions do not commit and their direct effect is not visible. The recent…
Randomized, skewed caches (RSCs) such as CEASER-S have recently received much attention to defend against contention-based cache side channels. By randomizing and regularly changing the mapping(s) of addresses to cache sets, these…