Related papers: SpecBox: A Label-Based Transparent Speculation Sch…

Task-based programming models have demonstrated their efficiency in the development of scientific applications on modern high-performance platforms. They allow delegation of the management of parallelization to the runtime system (RS),…

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…

Spectre v1 attacks, which exploit conditional branch misprediction, are often identified with attacks that bypass array bounds checking to leak data from a victim's memory. Generally, however, Spectre v1 attacks can exploit any conditional…

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 use historical data to estimate the potential benefit of speculative techniques for executing Ethereum smart contracts in parallel. We replay transaction traces of sampled blocks from the Ethereum blockchain over time, using a simple…

Caches have been exploited to leak secret information due to the different times they take to handle memory accesses. Cache timing attacks include non-speculative cache side and covert channel attacks and cache-based speculative execution…

In recent years, several hardware-based countermeasures proposed to mitigate Spectre attacks have been shown to be insecure. To enable the development of effective secure speculation countermeasures, we need easy-to-use tools that can…

Recent advancements in Mixture of Experts (MoE) models have significantly increased their parameter scale as well as model performance. Extensive offloading techniques have been proposed to address the GPU memory limitations of MoE…

Authors of cryptographic software are well aware that their code should not leak secrets through its timing behavior, and, until 2018, they believed that following industry-standard constant-time coding guidelines was sufficient. However,…

Recent advancements in speculative decoding have demonstrated considerable speedup across a wide array of large language model (LLM) tasks. Speculative decoding inherently relies on sacrificing extra memory allocations to generate several…

This paper proposes RCP, a new reversible coherence protocol that ensures invisible speculative load execution (ISLE) with low overhead. RCP can be combined with processor mechanisms that eliminate the effects of speculative instructions on…

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.…

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…

We introduce explicit speculation, a variant of I/O speculation technique where I/O system calls can be parallelized under the guidance of explicit application code knowledge. We propose a formal abstraction -- the foreaction graph -- which…

We propose the concept of Speculative Execution for Visual Analytics and discuss its effectiveness for model exploration and optimization. Speculative Execution enables the automatic generation of alternative, competing model configurations…

This paper provides the first systematic analysis of a synergistic threat model encompassing memory corruption vulnerabilities and microarchitectural side-channel vulnerabilities. We study speculative shield bypass attacks that leverage…

Spectre, Meltdown, and related attacks have demonstrated that kernels, hypervisors, trusted execution environments, and browsers are prone to information disclosure through micro-architectural weaknesses. However, it remains unclear as to…

Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are gradually adopted by major cloud providers, offering a practical option of \emph{confidential computing} for users who don't fully trust public clouds. TEEs use CPU-enabled hardware features to…

Efficient LLM inference on resource-constrained devices presents significant challenges in compute and memory utilization. Due to limited GPU memory, existing systems offload model weights to CPU memory, incurring substantial I/O overhead…

This paper argues and shows that speculative vectorization, where a loop with rare or unknown memory dependencies are still vectorized, is fundamentally vulnerable and cannot be mitigated by existing defenses. We implement a simple proof of…