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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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-08-21 Giorgi Maisuradze , Christian Rossow

CPU cache is a limited but crucial storage component in modern processors, whereas the cache timing side-channel may inadvertently leak information through the physically measurable timing variance. Speculative execution, an essential…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-02-18 Shengjian Guo , Yueqi Chen , Peng Li , Yueqiang Cheng , Huibo Wang , Meng Wu , Zhiqiang Zuo

In cache-based side channel attacks, an attacker infers information about the victim based on the presence, or lack thereof, of one or more cachelines. Determining a cacheline's presence, which we refer to as "reading the signal", typically…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-03-02 David A. Kaplan

Real-time sequential control agents are often bottlenecked by inference latency. Even modest per-step planning delays can destabilize control and degrade overall performance. We propose a speculation-and-correction framework that adapts the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Ziyang Lin , Zixuan Sun , Sanhorn Chen , Xiaoyang Chen , Roy Zhao

Speculative attacks such as Spectre can leak secret information without being discovered by the operating system. Speculative execution vulnerabilities are finicky and deep in the sense that to exploit them, it requires intensive manual…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-04-04 Evan Lai , Wenjie Xiong , Edward Suh , Mohit Tiwari , Mulong Luo

Spectre attacks disclosed in early 2018 expose data leakage scenarios via cache side channels. Specifically, speculatively executed paths due to branch mis-prediction may bring secret data into the cache which are then exposed via cache…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-05-26 Guanhua Wang , Sudipta Chattopadhyay , Arnab Kumar Biswas , Tulika Mitra , Abhik Roychoudhury

Microarchitectural timing attacks are a type of information leakage attack, which exploit the time-shared microarchitectural components, such as caches, translation look-aside buffers (TLBs), branch prediction unit (BPU), and speculative…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-04-14 Tuo Li , Bradley Hopkins , Sri Parameswaran

We study the problem of scheduling jobs on fault-prone machines communicating via a shared channel, also known as multiple-access channel. We have $n$ arbitrary length jobs to be scheduled on $m$ identical machines, $f$ of which are prone…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2018-07-26 Marek Klonowski , Dariusz R. Kowalski , Jarosław Mirek , Prudence W. H. Wong

Covert channels enable information leakage across security boundaries of the operating system. Microarchitectural covert channels exploit changes in execution timing resulting from competing access to limited hardware resources. We use the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-05-06 Nils Wistoff , Moritz Schneider , Frank K. Gürkaynak , Luca Benini , Gernot Heiser

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-09-30 Thomas Unterluggauer , Austin Harris , Scott Constable , Fangfei Liu , Carlos Rozas

Speculative execution techniques have been a cornerstone of modern processors to improve instruction-level parallelism. However, recent studies showed that this kind of techniques could be exploited by attackers to leak secret data via…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Bowen Tang , Chenggang Wu , Zhe Wang , Lichen Jia , Pen-Chung Yew , Yueqiang Cheng , Yinqian Zhang , Chenxi Wang , Guoqing Harry Xu

Recent work has introduced attacks that extract the architecture information of deep neural networks (DNN), as this knowledge enhances an adversary's capability to conduct black-box attacks against the model. This paper presents the first…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-02-03 Sanghyun Hong , Michael Davinroy , Yiǧitcan Kaya , Stuart Nevans Locke , Ian Rackow , Kevin Kulda , Dana Dachman-Soled , Tudor Dumitraş

Machine learning (ML) models can be trade secrets due to their development cost. Hence, they need protection against malicious forms of reverse engineering (e.g., in IP piracy). With a growing shift of ML to the edge devices, in part for…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-09-02 Anuj Dubey , Rosario Cammarota , Vikram Suresh , Aydin Aysu

Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) allow user processes to create enclaves that protect security-sensitive computation against access from the OS kernel and the hypervisor. Recent work has shown that TEEs are vulnerable to side-channel…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-12-20 Shujie Cui , Haohua Li , Yuanhong Li , Zhi Zhang , Lluís Vilanova , Peter Pietzuch

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,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-04-24 Yu Jin , Pengfei Qiu , Chunlu Wang , Yihao Yang , Dongsheng Wang , Gang Qu

Reasoning about correctness and security of software is increasingly difficult due to the complexity of modern microarchitectural features such as out-of-order execution. A class of security vulnerabilities termed Spectre that exploits side…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2020-04-02 Robert J. Colvin , Kirsten Winter

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-08-18 Yanan Guo , Andrew Zigerelli , Youtao Zhang , Jun Yang

Transient Execution Attacks (TEAs) have gradually become a major security threat to modern high-performance processors. They exploit the vulnerability of speculative execution to illegally access private data, and transmit them through…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-04-18 Bowen Tang , Chenggang Wu , Pen-Chung Yew , Yinqian Zhang , Mengyao Xie , Yuanming Lai , Yan Kang , Wei Wang , Qiang Wei , Zhe Wang

Spectre intrusions exploit speculative execution design vulnerabilities in modern processors. The attacks violate the principles of isolation in programs to gain unauthorized private user information. Current state-of-the-art detection…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-10-27 Chidera Biringa , Gaspard Baye , Gökhan Kul

Besides cryptographic secrets, side-channel attacks also leak sensitive user input. The most accurate attacks exploit cache timings or interrupt information to monitor keystroke timings and subsequently infer typed words and sentences.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2017-06-21 Michael Schwarz , Moritz Lipp , Daniel Gruss , Samuel Weiser , Clémentine Maurice , Raphael Spreitzer , Stefan Mangard