Related papers: Osiris: Automated Discovery of Microarchitectural …
Anomaly detection is critical for finding suspicious behavior in innumerable systems. We need to detect anomalies in real-time, i.e. determine if an incoming entity is anomalous or not, as soon as we receive it, to minimize the effects of…
Power analysis is a branch of side channel attacks where power consumption data is used as the side channel to attack the system. First using a device like an oscilloscope power traces are collected when the cryptographic device is doing…
How will future microarchitectures impact the security of existing cryptographic implementations? As we cannot keep reducing the size of transistors, chip vendors have started developing new microarchitectural optimizations to speed up…
Intel processors utilize the retirement to orderly retire the micro-ops that have been executed out of order. To enhance retirement utilization, the retirement is dynamically shared between two logical cores on the same physical core.…
In this paper, we reveal the existence of a new class of prefetcher, the XPT prefetcher, in the modern Intel processors which has never been officially documented. It speculatively issues a load, bypassing last-level cache (LLC) lookups,…
We present a software approach to mitigate access-driven side-channel attacks that leverage last-level caches (LLCs) shared across cores to leak information between security domains (e.g., tenants in a cloud). Our approach dynamically…
Electromagnetic (EM) side-channel analysis (SCA) is a prominent tool to break mathematically-secure cryptographic engines, especially on resource-constrained IoT devices. Presently, to perform EM SCA on an embedded IoT device, the entire…
Multi-process concurrency is effective in improving program efficiency and maximizing CPU utilization. The correct execution of concurrency is ensured by the mutual exclusion and synchronization mechanism (MESM) that manages the shared…
Transient execution attacks that exploit speculation have raised significant concerns in computer systems. Typically, branch predictors are leveraged to trigger mis-speculation in transient execution attacks. In this work, we demonstrate a…
Microarchitectural attacks compromise security by exploiting software-visible artifacts of microarchitectural optimizations such as caches and speculative execution. Defending against such attacks at the software level requires an…
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…
Microcode is an abstraction layer used by modern x86 processors that interprets user-visible CISC instructions to hardware-internal RISC instructions. The capability to update x86 microcode enables a vendor to modify CPU behavior in-field,…
Leakage contracts have recently been proposed as a new security abstraction at the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) level. Such contracts aim to faithfully capture the information processors may leak through side effects of their…
Side-channel attacks are important security challenges as they reveal sensitive information about on-chip activities. Among such attacks, the thermal side-channel has been shown to disclose the activities of key functional blocks and even…
Various side-channel attacks (SCAs) on ICs have been successfully demonstrated and also mitigated to some degree. In the context of 3D ICs, however, prior art has mainly focused on efficient implementations of classical SCA countermeasures.…
Scientists have built a variety of covert channels for secretive information transmission with CPU cache and main memory. In this paper, we turn to a lower level in the memory hierarchy, i.e., persistent storage. Most programs store…
Covert channels are communication channels used by attackers to transmit information from a compromised system when the access control policy of the system does not allow doing so. Previous work has shown that CPU frequency scaling can be…
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.…
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…
Side-channel attacks allow extracting secret information from the execution of cryptographic primitives by correlating the partially known computed data and the measured side-channel signal. However, to set up a successful side-channel…