Related papers: Transient Execution of Non-Canonical Accesses
Timing-based side and covert channels in processor caches continue to be a threat to modern computers. This work shows for the first time a systematic, large-scale analysis of Arm devices and the detailed results of attacks the processors…
Modern processors use branch prediction and speculative execution to maximize performance. For example, if the destination of a branch depends on a memory value that is in the process of being read, CPUs will try guess the destination and…
Existing speculative execution attacks are limited to breaching confidentiality of data beyond privilege boundary, the so-called spectre-type attacks. All of them utilize the changes in microarchitectural buffers made by the speculative…
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…
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…
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…
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"…
Modern processor advancements have introduced security risks, particularly in the form of microarchitectural timing attacks. High-profile attacks such as Meltdown and Spectre have revealed critical flaws, compromising the entire system's…
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,…
Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) is a set of hardware vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs that allows an attacker to leak bytes of data from memory loads and stores across various security boundaries. On affected CPUs, some of these…
GPU clouds have become a popular computing platform because of the cost of owning and maintaining high-performance computing clusters. Many cloud architectures have also been proposed to ensure a secure execution environment for guest…
As power consumption from AI training and inference continues to increase, AI accelerators are being integrated directly into the CPU. Intel's Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) is one such example, debuting on the 4th generation Intel Xeon…
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…
Side-channel attacks have become a severe threat to the confidentiality of computer applications and systems. One popular type of such attacks is the microarchitectural attack, where the adversary exploits the hardware features to break the…
The recent Spectre attacks have demonstrated that modern microarchitectural optimizations can make software insecure. These attacks use features like pipelining, out-of-order and speculation to extract information about the memory contents…
Spectre intrusions exploit speculative execution design vulnerabilities in modern processors. The attacks violate the principles of isolation in programs to gain unauthorized private user information. Current state-of-the-art detection…
Attacks like Spectre abuse speculative execution, one of the key performance optimizations of modern CPUs. Recently, several testing tools have emerged to automatically detect speculative leaks in commercial (black-box) CPUs. However, the…
The recent Spectre attacks has demonstrated the fundamental insecurity of current computer microarchitecture. The attacks use features like pipelining, out-of-order and speculation to extract arbitrary information about the memory contents…
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…
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…