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Intel has introduced a trusted computing technology, Intel Software Guard Extension (SGX), which provides an isolated and secure execution environment called enclave for a user program without trusting any privilege software (e.g., an…
The Least-Recently Used cache replacement policy and its variants are widely deployed in modern processors. This paper shows for the first time in detail that the LRU states of caches can be used to leak information: any access to a cache…
Security of embedded computing systems is becoming of paramount concern as these devices become more ubiquitous, contain personal information and are increasingly used for financial transactions. Security attacks targeting embedded systems…
Side-channel attacks have become prominent attack surfaces in cyberspace. Attackers use the side information generated by the system while performing a task. Among the various side-channel attacks, cache side-channel attacks are leading as…
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…
Apart from the actual CPU, modern server motherboards contain other auxiliary components, for example voltage regulators for power management. Those are connected to the CPU and the separate Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) via the…
This work presents a new tool to verify the correctness of cryptographic implementations with respect to cache attacks. Our methodology discovers vulnerabilities that are hard to find with other techniques, observed as exploitable leakage.…
Discovering new vulnerabilities and implementing security and privacy measures are important to protect systems and data against physical attacks. One such vulnerability is impedance, an inherent property of a device that can be exploited…
Modern processor advancements have introduced security risks, particularly in the form of microarchitectural timing attacks. High-profile attacks such as Meltdown and Spectre have revealed critical flaws, compromising the entire system's…
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…
Systems-on-chip (SoCs) are becoming heterogeneous: they combine general-purpose processor cores with application-specific hardware components, also known as accelerators, to improve performance and energy efficiency. The advantages of…
Existing tools to detect side-channel attacks on Intel SGX are grounded on the observation that attacks affect the performance of the victim application. As such, all detection tools monitor the potential victim and raise an alarm if the…
Recent proliferation of embedded systems has generated a bold new paradigm, known as open embedded systems. While traditional embedded systems provide only closed base applications (natively-installed software) to users, open embedded…
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…
Context switching is utilized by operating systems to change the execution context between application programs. It involves saving and restoring the states of multiple registers and performing a pipeline flush to remove any pre-fetched…
Out-of-order execution and speculative execution are among the biggest contributors to performance and efficiency of modern processors. However, they are inconsiderate, leaking secret data during the transient execution of instructions.…
A recent discovery of a new class of microarchitectural attacks called Spectre picked up the attention of the security community as these attacks can circumvent many traditional mechanisms of defense. One of the attacks---Bounds Check…
We present a novel mechanism to construct a covert channel based on page faults. A page fault is an event that occurs when a process or a thread tries to access a page of memory that is not currently mapped to its address space. The kernel…
Timing attacks are considered one of the most damaging side-channel attacks. These attacks exploit timing fluctuations caused by certain operations to disclose confidential information to an attacker. For instance, in asymmetric encryption,…
Supervised deep learning has emerged as an effective tool for carrying out power side-channel attacks on cryptographic implementations. While increasingly-powerful deep learning-based attacks are regularly published, comparatively-little…