Related papers: Selectively Delaying Instructions to Prevent Micro…
Transient execution attacks utilize micro-architectural covert channels to leak secrets that should not have been accessible during logical program execution. Commonly used micro-architectural covert channels are those that leave lasting…
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,…
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…
Modern processors are highly optimized systems where every single cycle of computation time matters. Many optimizations depend on the data that is being processed. Software-based microarchitectural attacks exploit effects of these…
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…
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…
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…
Speculative side-channel attacks access sensitive data and use transmitters to leak the data during wrong-path execution. Various defenses have been proposed to prevent such information leakage. However, not all speculatively executed…
Side-channel attacks have become a severe threat to the confidentiality of computer applications and systems. One popular type of such attacks is the microarchitectural attack, where the adversary exploits the hardware features to break the…
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…
Speculative execution attacks leverage the speculative and out-of-order execution features in modern computer processors to access secret data or execute code that should not be executed. Secret information can then be leaked through a…
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…
Microarchitectural timing attacks exploit subtle timing variations caused by hardware behaviors to leak sensitive information. In this paper, we introduce MCHammer, a novel side-channel technique that leverages machine clears induced by…
Microarchitectural timing side channels have been thoroughly investigated as a security threat in hardware designs featuring shared buffers (e.g., caches) or parallelism between attacker and victim task execution. However, contradicting…
Side-channel attacks have become prominent attack surfaces in cyberspace. Attackers use the side information generated by the system while performing a task. Among the various side-channel attacks, cache side-channel attacks are leading as…
Hardware caches are essential performance optimization features in modern processors to reduce the effective memory access time. Unfortunately, they are also the prime targets for attacks on computer processors because they are…
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…
Speculative execution attacks undermine the security of constant-time programming, the standard technique used to prevent microarchitectural side channels in security-sensitive software such as cryptographic code. Constant-time code must…
Microarchitectural side channels expose unprotected software to information leakage attacks where a software adversary is able to track runtime behavior of a benign process and steal secrets such as cryptographic keys. As suggested by…
Microarchitectural side channel attacks have been very prominent in security research over the last few years. Caches have been an outstanding covert channel, as they provide high resolution and generic cross-core leakage even with simple…