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Time variation during program execution can leak sensitive information. Time variations due to program control flow and hardware resource contention have been used to steal encryption keys in cipher implementations such as AES and RSA. A…

Side-channel attacks allow to extract sensitive information from cryptographic primitives by correlating the partially known computed data and the measured side-channel signal. Starting from the raw side-channel trace, the preprocessing of…

Many cybersecurity attacks rely on analyzing a binary executable to find exploitable sections of code. Code obfuscation is used to prevent attackers from reverse engineering these executables. In this work, we focus on control flow…

Performance degradation techniques are an important complement to side-channel attacks. In this work, we propose HyperDegrade -- a combination of previous approaches and the use of simultaneous multithreading (SMT) architectures. In…

Action and observation delays commonly occur in many Reinforcement Learning applications, such as remote control scenarios. We study the anatomy of randomly delayed environments, and show that partially resampling trajectory fragments in…

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…

Spectre attacks and their many subsequent variants are a new vulnerability class affecting modern CPUs. The attacks rely on the ability to misguide speculative execution, generally by exploiting the branch prediction structures, to execute…

A state-feedback watermarking signal design for the detection of replay attacks in linear systems is proposed. The control input is augmented with a random time-delayed term of the system state estimate, in order to secure the system…

CPUs provide isolation mechanisms like virtualization and privilege levels to protect software. Yet these focus on architectural isolation while typically overlooking microarchitectural side channels, exemplified by Meltdown and Foreshadow.…

Defending computer networks from cyber attack requires coordinating actions across multiple nodes based on imperfect indicators of compromise while minimizing disruptions to network operations. Advanced attacks can progress with few…

Symbolic execution is an effective path oriented and constraint based program analysis technique. Recently, there is a significant development in the research and application of symbolic execution. However, symbolic execution still suffers…

The "eternal war in cache" has reached browsers, with multiple cache-based side-channel attacks and countermeasures being suggested. A common approach for countermeasures is to disable or restrict JavaScript features deemed essential for…

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…

Learning to flexibly follow task instructions in dynamic environments poses interesting challenges for reinforcement learning agents. We focus here on the problem of learning control flow that deviates from a strict step-by-step execution…

Secret-dependent timing behavior in cryptographic implementations has resulted in exploitable vulnerabilities, undermining their security. Over the years, numerous tools to automatically detect timing leakage or even to prove their absence…

Shared caches are vulnerable to side channel attacks through contention in cache sets. Besides being a simple source of information leak, these side channels form useful gadgets for more sophisticated attacks that compromise the security of…

Speculative decoding accelerates memory-bound LLM inference without quality degradation by using a fast drafter to propose multiple candidate tokens and the target model to verify them in parallel. However, conventional sequential…

Locks have been widely used as an effective synchronization mechanism among processes and threads. However, we observe that a large number of false inter-thread dependencies (i.e., unnecessary lock contentions) exist during the program…

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are vulnerable to attacks targeting outgoing actuation commands that modify their physical behaviors. The limited resources in such systems, coupled with their stringent timing constraints, often prevents the…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance and have come to dominate the field of natural language processing (NLP) across various tasks. However, due to their strong instruction-following capabilities and…