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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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-06-19 Khaled N. Khasawneh , Esmaeil Mohammadian Koruyeh , Chengyu Song , Dmitry Evtyushkin , Dmitry Ponomarev , Nael Abu-Ghazaleh

The security of computer systems fundamentally relies on memory isolation, e.g., kernel address ranges are marked as non-accessible and are protected from user access. In this paper, we present Meltdown. Meltdown exploits side effects of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-01-08 Moritz Lipp , Michael Schwarz , Daniel Gruss , Thomas Prescher , Werner Haas , Stefan Mangard , Paul Kocher , Daniel Genkin , Yuval Yarom , Mike Hamburg

Timing channels enable data leakage that threatens the security of computer systems, from cloud platforms to smartphones and browsers executing untrusted third-party code. Preventing unauthorised information flow is a core duty of the…

Operating Systems · Computer Science 2018-10-17 Qian Ge , Yuval Yarom , Tom Chothia , Gernot Heiser

Power side-channel attacks are a very effective cryptanalysis technique that can infer secret keys of security ICs by monitoring the power consumption. Since the emergence of practical attacks in the late 90s, they have been a major threat…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2016-05-04 Lu Zhang , Luis Vega , Michael Taylor

The timing characteristics of cache, a high-speed storage between the fast CPU and the slowmemory, may reveal sensitive information of a program, thus allowing an adversary to conduct side-channel attacks. Existing methods for detecting…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-07-10 Shengjian Guo , Meng Wu , Chao Wang

Covert channel attacks represent a significant threat to system security, leveraging shared resources to clandestinely transmit information from highly secure systems, thereby violating the system's security policies. These attacks exploit…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-04-10 Shariful Alam , Jidong Xiao , Nasir U. Eisty

Microarchitectural side channels expose unprotected software to information leakage attacks where a software adversary is able to track runtime behavior of a benign process and steal secrets such as cryptographic keys. As suggested by…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-04-25 Jan Wichelmann , Ahmad Moghimi , Thomas Eisenbarth , Berk Sunar

Although cryptographic algorithms may be mathematically secure, it is often possible to leak secret information from the implementation of the algorithms. Timing and power side-channel vulnerabilities are some of the most widely considered…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Ferhat Erata , Ruzica Piskac , Victor Mateu , Jakub Szefer

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-05-09 MD Mahady Hassan , Shanto Roy , Reza Rahaeimehr

Fault injection attacks represent a class of threats that can compromise embedded systems across multiple layers of abstraction, such as system software, instruction set architecture (ISA), microarchitecture, and physical implementation.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-05-07 Arsalan Ali Malik , Harshvadan Mihir , Aydin Aysu

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-01-30 Matteo Busi , Job Noorman , Jo Van Bulck , Letterio Galletta , Pierpaolo Degano , Jan Tobias Mühlberg , Frank Piessens

Designers use third-party intellectual property (IP) cores and outsource various steps in the integrated circuit (IC) design and manufacturing flow. As a result, security vulnerabilities have been rising. This is forcing IC designers and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-03-07 Hammond Pearce , Ramesh Karri , Benjamin Tan

Modern processors widely equip the Performance Monitoring Unit (PMU) to collect various architecture and microarchitecture events. Software developers often utilize the PMU to enhance program's performance, but the potential side effects…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Zhouyang Li , Pengfei Qiu , Yu Qing , Chunlu Wang , Dongsheng Wang , Xiao Zhang , Gang Qu

Timing-based side or covert channels in processor caches continue to present a threat to computer systems, and they are the key to many of the recent Spectre and Meltdown attacks. Based on improvements to an existing three-step model for…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-11-21 Shuwen Deng , Wenjie Xiong , Jakub Szefer

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-09-23 Ghada Dessouky , Tommaso Frassetto , Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi

The code generation modules inside modern compilers such as GCC and LLVM, which use a limited number of CPU registers to store a large number of program variables, may introduce side-channel leaks even in software equipped with…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-02-28 Jingbo Wang , Chungha Sung , Chao Wang

Timing-based side and covert channels in processor caches continue to be a threat to modern computers. This work shows for the first time a systematic, large-scale analysis of Arm devices and the detailed results of attacks the processors…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Shuwen Deng , Nikolay Matyunin , Wenjie Xiong , Stefan Katzenbeisser , Jakub Szefer

Chip designers outsource chip fabrication to external foundries, but at the risk of IP theft. Logic locking, a promising solution to mitigate this threat, adds extra logic gates (key gates) and inputs (key bits) to the chip so that it…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2017-03-31 Mohamed El Massad , Jun Zhang , Siddharth Garg , Mahesh V. Tripunitara

The run-time electromagnetic (EM) emanation of microprocessors presents a side-channel that leaks the confidentiality of the applications running on them. Many recent works have demonstrated successful attacks leveraging such side-channels…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Nuntipat Narkthong , Yukui Luo , Xiaolin Xu

Cache side channel attacks are a sophisticated and persistent threat that exploit vulnerabilities in modern processors to extract sensitive information. These attacks leverage weaknesses in shared computational resources, particularly the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-01-29 Tejal Joshi , Aarya Kawalay , Anvi Jamkhande , Amit Joshi