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Existing tools to detect side-channel attacks on Intel SGX are grounded on the observation that attacks affect the performance of the victim application. As such, all detection tools monitor the potential victim and raise an alarm if the…
Microarchitectural optimizations are expected to play a crucial role in ensuring performance scalability in future technology nodes. However, recent attacks have demonstrated that microarchitectural optimizations, which were assumed to be…
Modern microarchitectures incorporate optimization techniques such as speculative loads and store forwarding to improve the memory bottleneck. The processor executes the load speculatively before the stores, and forwards the data of a…
Micro-architectural attacks use information leaked through shared resources to break hardware-enforced isolation. These attacks have been used to steal private information ranging from cryptographic keys to privileged Operating System (OS)…
Computer systems often provide hardware support for isolation mechanisms like privilege levels, virtual memory, or enclaved execution. Over the past years, several successful software-based side-channel attacks have been developed that…
Transient execution attacks have been one of the widely explored microarchitectural side channels since the discovery of Spectre and Meltdown. However, much of the research has been driven by manual discovery of new transient paths through…
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…
Runahead execution is a continuously evolving microarchitectural technique for processor performance. This paper introduces the first transient execution attack on the runahead execution, called SPECRUN, which exploits the unresolved branch…
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…
Side-channel attacks on microprocessors, like the RISC-V, exhibit security vulnerabilities that lead to several design challenges. Hence, it is imperative to study and analyze these security vulnerabilities comprehensively. In this paper,…
Side channel attacks steal secret keys by cleverly leveraging information leakages and can, therefore, break encryption. Thus, detection and mitigation of side channel attacks is a very important problem, but the solutions proposed in the…
RISC-V processors are becoming ubiquitous in critical applications, but their susceptibility to microarchitectural side-channel attacks is a serious concern. Detection of microarchitectural attacks in RISC-V is an emerging research topic…
Rigorous quantitative evaluation of microarchitectural side channels is challenging for two reasons. First, the processors, attacks, and defenses often exhibit probabilistic behaviors. These probabilistic behaviors arise due to natural…
Practical attacks that exploit speculative execution can leak confidential information via microarchitectural side channels. The recently-demonstrated Spectre attacks leverage speculative loads which circumvent access checks to read…
Many hardware structures in today's high-performance out-of-order processors do not scale in an efficient way. To address this, different solutions have been proposed that build execution schedules in an energy-efficient manner. Issue time…
Side-channel attacks on memory (SCAM) exploit unintended data leaks from memory subsystems to infer sensitive information, posing significant threats to system security. These attacks exploit vulnerabilities in memory access patterns, cache…
The recent discovery of the Spectre and Meltdown attacks represents a watershed moment not just for the field of Computer Security, but also of Programming Languages. This paper explores speculative side-channel attacks and their…
The adversarial model presented by trusted execution environments (TEEs) has prompted researchers to investigate unusual attack vectors. One particularly powerful class of controlled-channel attacks abuses page-table modifications to…
Trusted execution environments (TEEs) offer hardware-assisted means to protect code and data. However, as shown in numerous results over the years, attackers can use side-channels to leak data access patterns and even single-step the code.…
Side-channel attacks allow extracting secret information from the execution of cryptographic primitives by correlating the partially known computed data and the measured side-channel signal. However, to set up a successful side-channel…