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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…

Constant-time code has become the de-facto standard for secure cryptographic implementations. However, some memory-based leakage classes such as ciphertext side-channels and silent stores remain unaddressed. Prior work proposed three…

Timing side channels pose a significant threat to the security and privacy of software applications. We propose an approach for mitigating this problem by decreasing the strength of the side channels as measured by entropy-based objectives,…

As industry moves toward chiplet-based designs, the insertion of hardware Trojans poses a significant threat to the security of these systems. These systems rely heavily on cache coherence for coherent data communication, making coherence…

Authors of cryptographic software are well aware that their code should not leak secrets through its timing behavior, and, until 2018, they believed that following industry-standard constant-time coding guidelines was sufficient. However,…

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models enable sparse expert activation, meaning that only a subset of the model's parameters is used during each inference. However, to translate this sparsity into practical performance, an expert caching mechanism…

Just-in-time compilation provides significant performance improvements for programs written in dynamic languages. These benefits come from the ability of the compiler to speculate about likely cases and generate optimized code for these.…

Covert channel networks are a well-known method for circumventing the security measures organizations put in place to protect their networks from adversarial attacks. This paper introduces a novel method based on bit-rate modulation for…

This paper studies the security of a secure communication scheme based on two discrete-time intermittently-chaotic systems synchronized via a common random driving signal. Some security defects of the scheme are revealed: 1) the key space…

This paper studies the general problem of operating energy storage under uncertainty. Two fundamental sources of uncertainty are considered, namely the uncertainty in the unexpected fluctuation of the net demand process and the uncertainty…

The USB protocol has become a ubiquitous standard for connecting peripherals to computers, making its security a critical concern. A recent research study demonstrated the potential to exploit weaknesses in well-established protocols, such…

Side channel attacks are a major class of attacks to crypto-systems. Attackers collect and analyze timing behavior, I/O data, or power consumption in these systems to undermine their effectiveness in protecting sensitive information. In…

High-confidence computing relies on trusted instructional set architecture, sealed kernels, and secure operating systems. Cloud computing depends on trusted systems for virtualization tasks. Branch predictions and pipelines are essential in…

Confidential Computing (CC) has received increasing attention in recent years as a mechanism to protect user data from untrusted operating systems (OSes). Existing CC solutions hide confidential memory from the OS and/or encrypt it to…

Recently, out-of-order execution, an important performance optimization in modern high-end processors, has been revealed to pose a significant security threat, allowing information leaks across security domains. In particular, the Meltdown…

We present uSpectre, a new class of transient execution attacks that exploit microcode branch mispredictions to transiently leak sensitive data. We find that many long-known and recently-discovered transient execution attacks, which were…

Substantial efforts are invested in improving network security, but the threat landscape is rapidly evolving, particularly with the recent interest in programmable network hardware. We explore a new security threat, from an attacker who has…

This paper argues and shows that speculative vectorization, where a loop with rare or unknown memory dependencies are still vectorized, is fundamentally vulnerable and cannot be mitigated by existing defenses. We implement a simple proof of…

Since the advent of SPECTRE, a number of countermeasures have been proposed and deployed. Rigorously reasoning about their effectiveness, however, requires a well-defined notion of security against speculative execution attacks, which has…

Shared processor caches are vulnerable to conflict-based side-channel attacks, where an attacker can monitor access patterns of a victim by evicting victim cache lines using cache-set conflicts. Recent mitigations propose randomized mapping…