Related papers: Revizor: Testing Black-box CPUs against Speculatio…
Attacks like Spectre abuse speculative execution, one of the key performance optimizations of modern CPUs. Recently, several testing tools have emerged to automatically detect speculative leaks in commercial (black-box) CPUs. However, the…
Recently discovered Spectre and meltdown attacks affects almost all processors by leaking confidential information to other processes through side-channel attacks. These vulnerabilities expose design flaws in the architecture of modern…
Microarchitectural attacks represent a challenging and persistent threat to modern processors, exploiting inherent design vulnerabilities in processors to leak sensitive information or compromise systems. Of particular concern is the…
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…
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 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…
SpecFuzz is the first tool that enables dynamic testing for speculative execution vulnerabilities (e.g., Spectre). The key is a novel concept of speculation exposure: The program is instrumented to simulate speculative execution in software…
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…
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…
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…
Modern out-of-order processors face speculative execution attacks. Despite various proposed software and hardware mitigations to prevent such attacks, new attacks keep arising from unknown vulnerabilities. Thus, a formal and rigorous…
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.…
The recent Spectre attacks has demonstrated the fundamental insecurity of current computer microarchitecture. The attacks use features like pipelining, out-of-order and speculation to extract arbitrary information about the memory contents…
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…
Spectre attacks exploit speculative execution to leak sensitive information. In the last few years, a number of static side-channel detectors have been proposed to detect cache leakage in the presence of speculative execution. However,…
Speculative execution enhances processor performance by predicting intermediate results and executing instructions based on these predictions. However, incorrect predictions can lead to security vulnerabilities, as speculative instructions…
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…
We propose using reinforcement learning to address the challenges of discovering microarchitectural vulnerabilities, such as Spectre and Meltdown, which exploit subtle interactions in modern processors. Traditional methods like random…
Speculative execution is a hardware optimisation technique where a processor, while waiting on the completion of a computation required for an instruction, continues to execute later instructions based on a predicted value of the pending…
Modern processors employ different prediction mechanisms to speculate over different kinds of instructions. Attackers can exploit these prediction mechanisms simultaneously in order to trigger leaks about speculatively-accessed data. Thus,…