Related papers: Osiris: Automated Discovery of Microarchitectural …
Transient execution attacks utilize micro-architectural covert channels to leak secrets that should not have been accessible during logical program execution. Commonly used micro-architectural covert channels are those that leave lasting…
Transient execution attacks have been one of the widely explored microarchitectural side channels since the discovery of Spectre and Meltdown. However, much of the research has been driven by manual discovery of new transient paths through…
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…
The transient execution attack is a type of attack leveraging the vulnerability of modern CPU optimization technologies. New attacks surface rapidly. The side-channel is a key part of transient execution attacks to leak data. In this work,…
Side channel attacks steal secret keys by cleverly leveraging information leakages and can, therefore, break encryption. Thus, detection and mitigation of side channel attacks is a very important problem, but the solutions proposed in the…
The complexity of modern processor architectures has given rise to sophisticated interactions among their components. Such interactions may result in potential attack vectors in terms of side channels, possibly available to user-land…
Microarchitectural timing side channels have been thoroughly investigated as a security threat in hardware designs featuring shared buffers (e.g., caches) or parallelism between attacker and victim task execution. However, contradicting…
Operating Systems enforce logical isolation using abstractions such as processes, containers, and isolation technologies to protect a system from malicious or buggy code. In this paper, we show new types of side channels through the file…
Modern processor designs use a variety of microarchitectural methods to achieve high performance. Unfortunately, new side-channels have often been uncovered that exploit these enhanced designs. One area that has received little attention…
Timing channels are information flows, encoded in the relative timing of events, that bypass the system's protection mechanisms. Any microarchitectural state that depends on execution history and affects the rate of progress of later…
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 transient-execution attack Meltdown leaks sensitive information by transiently accessing inaccessible data during out-of-order execution. Although Meltdown is fixed in hardware for recent CPU generations, most currently-deployed CPUs…
Modern x86 processors have many prefetch instructions that can be used by programmers to boost performance. However, these instructions may also cause security problems. In particular, we found that on Intel processors, there are two…
Covert channels enable information leakage across security boundaries of the operating system. Microarchitectural covert channels exploit changes in execution timing resulting from competing access to limited hardware resources. We use the…
New data processing pipelines and novel network architectures increasingly drive the success of deep learning. In consequence, the industry considers top-performing architectures as intellectual property and devotes considerable…
Recent work has shown that out-of-order and speculative execution mechanisms used to increase performance in the majority of processors expose the processors to critical attacks. These attacks, called Meltdown and Spectre, exploit the side…
To improve efficiency, nearly all parallel processing units (CPUs and GPUs) implement relaxed memory models in which memory operations may be re-ordered, i.e., executed out-of-order. Prior testing work in this area found that memory…
Analogously to classical computers, quantum processors exhibit side channels that may give attackers access to potentially proprietary algorithms. We identify and exploit a previously unexplored side channel in trapped-ion quantum…
Cache side-channel attacks extract secrets by examining how victim software accesses cache. To date, practical attacks on cryptosystems and media libraries are demonstrated under different scenarios, inferring secret keys and reconstructing…
Side-channel attacks have become a severe threat to the confidentiality of computer applications and systems. One popular type of such attacks is the microarchitectural attack, where the adversary exploits the hardware features to break the…