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At the edge of modern cyber-physical systems, Micro-Controller Units (MCUs) are responsible for safety-critical sensing/actuation. However, MCU cost constraints rule out the usual security mechanisms of general-purpose computers. Thus,…

Speculative multi-threading (SpMT) has been proposed as a perspective method to exploit Chip Multiprocessors (CMP) hardware potential. It is a thread level speculation (TLS) model mainly depending on software and hardware co-design. This…

Processing sensitive data, such as those produced by body sensors, on third-party untrusted clouds is particularly challenging without compromising the privacy of the users generating it. Typically, these sensors generate large quantities…

SPEculative Execution side Channel Hardware (SPEECH) Vulnerabilities have enabled the notorious Meltdown, Spectre, and L1 terminal fault (L1TF) attacks. While a number of studies have reported different variants of SPEECH vulnerabilities,…

To improve the overall performance of processors, computer architects use various performance optimization techniques in modern processors, such as speculative execution, branch prediction, and chaotic execution. Both now and in the future,…

Transient execution vulnerabilities have emerged as a critical threat to modern processors. Hardware fuzzing testing techniques have recently shown promising results in discovering transient execution bugs in large-scale out-of-order…

Large language models incur high inference latency due to sequential autoregressive decoding. Speculative decoding alleviates this bottleneck by using a lightweight draft model to propose multiple tokens for batched verification. However,…

Large language models increasingly use external tools such as web search and document retrieval to solve information-intensive tasks. However, multi-hop tool use in complex tasks introduces substantial latency, since the model must…

ARM Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) is a new hardware feature introduced in ARMv8.5-A architecture, aiming to detect memory corruption vulnerabilities. The low overhead of MTE makes it an attractive solution to mitigate memory corruption…

Constant-time (CT) verification tools are commonly used for detecting potential side-channel vulnerabilities in cryptographic libraries. Recently, a new class of tools, called speculative constant-time (SCT) tools, has also been used for…

Efficient cloud computing relies on in-process isolation to optimize performance by running workloads within a single process. Without heavy-weight process isolation, memory safety errors pose a significant security threat by allowing an…

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models enable sparse expert activation, meaning that only a subset of the model's parameters is used during each inference. However, to translate this sparsity into practical performance, an expert caching mechanism…

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…

Fault-tolerance is critically important in highly-distributed modern cloud applications. Solutions such as Temporal, Azure Durable Functions, and Beldi hide fault-tolerance complexity from developers by persisting execution state and…

There are many methods developed to mitigate transients induced when abruptly changing dynamic algorithms such as those found in digital filters or controllers. These "bumpless transfer" methods have a computational burden to them and take…

The increasing scale and sophistication of cyberattacks has led to the adoption of machine learning based classification techniques, at the core of cybersecurity systems. These techniques promise scale and accuracy, which traditional rule…

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…

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by drafting a tree of candidate continuations and verifying it in one target forward. Existing drafters fall into two camps with opposite weaknesses. Autoregressive drafters such as EAGLE-3…

Modern multi-core processors share cache resources for maximum cache utilization and performance gains. However, this leaves the cache vulnerable to side-channel attacks, where timing differences in shared cache behavior are exploited to…

We present a kernel-level infrastructure that allows system-wide detection of malicious applications attempting to exploit cache-based side-channel attacks to break the process confinement enforced by standard operating systems. This…