Related papers: An Exhaustive Approach to Detecting Transient Exec…
Recent discovery of security attacks in advanced processors, known as Spectre and Meltdown, has resulted in high public alertness about security of hardware. The root cause of these attacks is information leakage across "covert channels"…
In the last two decades, the evolving cyber-threat landscape has brought to center stage the contentious tradeoffs between the security and performance of modern microprocessors. The guarantees provided by the hardware to ensure no…
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,…
Modern out-of-order processors face speculative execution attacks. Despite various proposed software and hardware mitigations to prevent such attacks, new attacks keep arising from unknown vulnerabilities. Thus, a formal and rigorous…
Transient execution attacks, also called speculative execution attacks, have drawn much interest as they exploit the transient execution of instructions, e.g., during branch prediction, to leak data. Transient execution is fundamental to…
Software-exploitable Hardware Trojans (HTs) enable attackers to execute unauthorized software or gain illicit access to privileged operations. This manuscript introduces a hardware-based methodology for detecting runtime HT activations…
Research on transient execution attacks including Spectre and Meltdown showed that exception or branch misprediction events might leave secret-dependent traces in the CPU's microarchitectural state. This observation led to a proliferation…
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…
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…
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…
Runahead execution is a continuously evolving microarchitectural technique for processor performance. This paper introduces the first transient execution attack on the runahead execution, called SPECRUN, which exploits the unresolved branch…
Speculative execution techniques have been a cornerstone of modern processors to improve instruction-level parallelism. However, recent studies showed that this kind of techniques could be exploited by attackers to leak secret data via…
The Check tools automate formal memory consistency model and security verification of processors by analyzing abstract models of microarchitectures, called $\mu$SPEC models. Despite the efficacy of this approach, a verification gap between…
We propose using reinforcement learning to address the challenges of discovering microarchitectural vulnerabilities, such as Spectre and Meltdown, which exploit subtle interactions in modern processors. Traditional methods like random…
In this paper, we take a deep dive into microarchitectural security from a hardware designer's perspective by reviewing the existing approaches to detect hardware vulnerabilities during the design phase. We show that a protection gap…
A new class of vulnerabilities related to speculative and out-of-order execution, fault-injection, and microarchitectural side channels rose to attention in 2018. The techniques behind the transient execution vulnerabilities were not new,…
Heterogeneous parallel error detection is an approach to achieving fault-tolerant processors, leveraging multiple power-efficient cores to re-execute software originally run on a high-performance core. Yet, its complex components, gathering…
Many security and software testing applications require checking whether certain properties of a program hold for any possible usage scenario. For instance, a tool for identifying software vulnerabilities may need to rule out the existence…
Out-of-order execution and speculative execution are among the biggest contributors to performance and efficiency of modern processors. However, they are inconsiderate, leaking secret data during the transient execution of instructions.…
The recent surge in hardware security is significant due to offshoring the proprietary Intellectual property (IP). One distinct dimension of the disruptive threat is malicious logic insertion, also known as Hardware Trojan (HT). HT subverts…