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Recent work has shown that out-of-order and speculative execution mechanisms used to increase performance in the majority of processors expose the processors to critical attacks. These attacks, called Meltdown and Spectre, exploit the side…
Caches are used to reduce the speed differential between the CPU and memory to improve the performance of modern processors. However, attackers can use contention-based cache timing attacks to steal sensitive information from victim…
To improve the overall performance of processors, computer architects use various performance optimization techniques in modern processors, such as speculative execution, branch prediction, and chaotic execution. Both now and in the future,…
Modern multi-core processors share cache resources for maximum cache utilization and performance gains. However, this leaves the cache vulnerable to side-channel attacks, where timing differences in shared cache behavior are exploited to…
Caches have become the prime method for unintended information extraction across logical isolation boundaries. Even Spectre and Meltdown rely on the cache side channel, as it provides great resolution and is widely available on all major…
ISA extensions are increasingly adopted to boost the performance of specialized workloads without requiring an entire architectural redesign. However, these enhancements can inadvertently expose new attack surfaces in the microarchitecture.…
Speculation is key to achieving high CPU performance, yet it enables risks like Spectre attacks which remain a significant challenge to mitigate without incurring substantial performance overheads. These attacks typically unfold in three…
Side-channel attacks are a security exploit that take advantage of information leakage. They use measurement and analysis of physical parameters to reverse engineer and extract secrets from a system. Power analysis attacks in particular,…
Intel SGX is known to be vulnerable to a class of practical attacks exploiting memory access pattern side-channels, notably page-fault attacks and cache timing attacks. A promising hardening scheme is to wrap applications in hardware…
Recently discovered Spectre and meltdown attacks affects almost all processors by leaking confidential information to other processes through side-channel attacks. These vulnerabilities expose design flaws in the architecture of modern…
Applications with irregular data structures, data-dependent control flows and fine-grained data transfers (e.g., real-world graph computations) perform poorly on cache-based systems. We propose the UpDown accelerator that supports…
We discuss practical methods to ensure near wirespeed performance from clusters with either one or two Intel(R) Omni-Path host fabric interfaces (HFI) per node, and Intel(R) Xeon Phi(TM) 72xx (Knight's Landing) processors, and using the…
GPUs are increasingly being used in security applications, especially for accelerating encryption/decryption. While GPUs are an attractive platform in terms of performance, the security of these devices raises a number of concerns. One…
The transient execution attack is a type of attack leveraging the vulnerability of modern CPU optimization technologies. New attacks surface rapidly. The side-channel is a key part of transient execution attacks to leak data. In this work,…
We present a kernel-level infrastructure that allows system-wide detection of malicious applications attempting to exploit cache-based side-channel attacks to break the process confinement enforced by standard operating systems. This…
Caches on the modern commodity CPUs have become one of the major sources of side-channel leakages and been abused as a new attack vector. To thwart the cache-based side-channel attacks, two types of countermeasures have been proposed:…
We describe a strategy for code modernisation of Gadget, a widely used community code for computational astrophysics. The focus of this work is on node-level performance optimisation, targeting current multi/many-core IntelR architectures.…
Modern multicore processors are employing large last-level caches, for example Intel's E7-8800 processor uses 24MB L3 cache. Further, with each CMOS technology generation, leakage energy has been dramatically increasing and hence, leakage…
The recent Meltdown and Spectre attacks highlight the importance of automated verification techniques for identifying hardware security vulnerabilities. We have developed a tool for synthesizing microarchitecture-specific programs capable…
Modern x86 processors have many prefetch instructions that can be used by programmers to boost performance. However, these instructions may also cause security problems. In particular, we found that on Intel processors, there are two…