Related papers: Osiris: Automated Discovery of Microarchitectural …

Microarchitectural timing channels exploit information leakage between security domains that should be isolated, bypassing the operating system's security boundaries. These channels result from contention for shared microarchitectural…

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…

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…

Time variation during program execution can leak sensitive information. Time variations due to program control flow and hardware resource contention have been used to steal encryption keys in cipher implementations such as AES and RSA. A…

Nowadays, in operating systems, numerous protection mechanisms prevent or limit the user-mode applicationsto access the kernels internal information. This is regularlycarried out by software-based defenses such as Address Space Layout…

Secret-dependent timing behavior in cryptographic implementations has resulted in exploitable vulnerabilities, undermining their security. Over the years, numerous tools to automatically detect timing leakage or even to prove their absence…

We introduce a new timing side-channel attack on Intel CPU processors. Our Frontal attack exploits timing differences that arise from how the CPU frontend fetches and processes instructions while being interrupted. In particular, we observe…

Meltdown and Spectre exploit microarchitectural changes the CPU makes during transient out-of-order execution. Using side-channel techniques, these attacks enable leaking arbitrary data from memory. As state-of-the-art software mitigations…

There is a long history of side channels in the memory hierarchy of modern CPUs. Especially the cache side channel is widely used in the context of transient execution attacks and covert channels. Therefore, many secure cache architectures…

Trusted execution environments (TEEs) offer hardware-assisted means to protect code and data. However, as shown in numerous results over the years, attackers can use side-channels to leak data access patterns and even single-step the code.…

Cache-based side channels enable a dedicated attacker to reveal program secrets by measuring the cache access patterns. Practical attacks have been shown against real-world crypto algorithm implementations such as RSA, AES, and ElGamal. By…

Covert channel attacks have been continuously studied as severe threats to modern computing systems. Software-based covert channels are a typically hard-to-detect branch of these attacks, since they leverage virtual resources to establish…

Side-channel attacks are a security exploit that take advantage of information leakage. They use measurement and analysis of physical parameters to reverse engineer and extract secrets from a system. Power analysis attacks in particular,…

To meet the ever-growing need for performance in silicon devices, SoC providers have been increasingly relying on software-hardware cooperation. By controlling hardware resources such as power or clock management from the software,…

Microarchitectural side channel attacks have been very prominent in security research over the last few years. Caches have been an outstanding covert channel, as they provide high resolution and generic cross-core leakage even with simple…

Modern computer processors use microarchitectural optimization mechanisms to improve performance. As a downside, such optimizations are prone to introducing side-channel vulnerabilities. Speculative loading of memory, called prefetching, is…

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are a ubiquitous component across the range of today's computing platforms, from phones and tablets, through personal computers, to high-end server class platforms. With the increasing importance of graphics…

The Spectre vulnerability in modern processors has been widely reported. The key insight in this vulnerability is that speculative execution in processors can be misused to access the secrets. Subsequently, even though the speculatively…

Modern processors are highly optimized systems where every single cycle of computation time matters. Many optimizations depend on the data that is being processed. Software-based microarchitectural attacks exploit effects of these…

This paper evaluates new security threats due to the processor frontend in modern Intel processors. The root causes of the security threats are the multiple paths in the processor frontend that the micro-operations can take: through the…