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Related papers: Transient Execution of Non-Canonical Accesses

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Recent attacks have broken process isolation by exploiting microarchitectural side channels that allow indirect access to shared microarchitectural state. Enclaves strengthen the process abstraction to restore isolation guarantees. We…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-08-30 Thomas Bourgeat , Ilia Lebedev , Andrew Wright , Sizhuo Zhang , Arvind , Srinivas Devadas

In recent years we have seen an explosion in the usage of low-cost, low-power microcontrollers (MCUs) in embedded devices around us due to the popularity of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Although this is good from an economics…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-02-01 Haoqi Shan , Dean Sullivan , Orlando Arias

The disclosure of the Spectre speculative-execution attacks in January 2018 has left a severe vulnerability that systems are still struggling with how to patch. The solutions that currently exist tend to have incomplete coverage, perform…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Sam Ainsworth , Timothy M. Jones

Covert channel attacks represent a significant threat to system security, leveraging shared resources to clandestinely transmit information from highly secure systems, thereby violating the system's security policies. These attacks exploit…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-04-10 Shariful Alam , Jidong Xiao , Nasir U. Eisty

Speculative execution which is used pervasively in modern CPUs can leave side effects in the processor caches and other structures even when the speculated instructions do not commit and their direct effect is not visible. The recent…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-06-19 Khaled N. Khasawneh , Esmaeil Mohammadian Koruyeh , Chengyu Song , Dmitry Evtyushkin , Dmitry Ponomarev , Nael Abu-Ghazaleh

Spectre and Meltdown attacks and their variants exploit hardware performance optimization features to cause security breaches. Secret information is accessed and leaked through covert or side channels. New attack variants keep appearing and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-12-24 Zecheng He , Guangyuan Hu , Ruby Lee

Recent studies highlighting the vulnerability of computer architecture to information leakage attacks have been a cause of significant concern. Among the various classes of microarchitectural attacks, cache timing channels are especially…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-02-14 Fan Yao , Hongyu Fang , Milos Doroslovacki , Guru Venkataramani

Correctness for microprocessors is generally understood to be conformance with the associated instruction set architecture (ISA). This is the basis for one of the most important abstractions in computer science, allowing hardware designers…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Andrew T. Walter , Konstantinos Athanasiou , Panagiotis Manolios

With the significant development of the Internet of Things and low-cost cloud services, the sensory and data processing requirements of IoT systems are continually going up. TrustZone is a hardware-protected Trusted Execution Environment…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-01-12 Arup Kumar Sarker , Md Khairul Islam , Yuan Tian

Malware usually target computers according to their operating system. Thus we have Windows malwares, Linux malwares and so on ... In this paper, we consider a different approach and show on a technical basis how easily malware can recognize…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2015-03-17 Anthony Desnos , Robert Erra , Eric Filiol

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-09-11 Weon Taek Na , Joel S. Emer , Mengjia Yan

As machine learning models become increasingly deployed across the edge of internet of things environments, a partitioned deep learning paradigm in which models are split across multiple computational nodes introduces a new dimension of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Giulio Rossolini , Fabio Brau , Alessandro Biondi , Battista Biggio , Giorgio Buttazzo

Timing-based side or covert channels in processor caches continue to present a threat to computer systems, and they are the key to many of the recent Spectre and Meltdown attacks. Based on improvements to an existing three-step model for…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-11-21 Shuwen Deng , Wenjie Xiong , Jakub Szefer

Memory protection units (MPUs) are hardware-assisted security features that are commonly used in embedded processors such as the ARM 940T, Infineon TC1775, and Xilinx Zynq. MPUs partition the memory statically, and set individual protection…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Bharadwaj Madabhushi , Chandra Sekhar Mummidi , Sandip Kundu , Daniel Holcomb

Cache side-channel attacks lead to severe security threats to the settings that a CPU is shared across users, e.g., in the cloud. The existing attacks rely on sensing the micro-architectural state changes made by victims, and this…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Junpeng Wan , Yanxiang Bi , Zhe Zhou , Zhou Li

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) represents a significant advancement in AI-tool integration, enabling seamless communication between AI agents and external services. However, this connectivity introduces novel attack vectors that remain…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Nicola Croce , Tobin South

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-10-11 Oleksii Oleksenko , Bohdan Trach , Tobias Reiher , Mark Silberstein , Christof Fetzer

Transient execution side-channel attacks, such as Spectre, have been shown to break almost all isolation primitives. We introduce a new security property we call relaxed microarchitectural isolation (RMI) that allows sensitive programs that…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Jules Drean , Miguel Gomez-Garcia , Fisher Jepsen , Thomas Bourgeat , Srinivas Devadas

Hardware-based Trusted execution environments (TEEs) offer an isolation granularity of virtual machine abstraction. They provide confidential VMs (CVMs) that host security-sensitive code and data. AMD SEV-SNP and Intel TDX enable CVMs and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-04-05 Benedict Schlüter , Supraja Sridhara , Mark Kuhne , Andrin Bertschi , Shweta Shinde

Speculative execution attacks leverage the speculative and out-of-order execution features in modern computer processors to access secret data or execute code that should not be executed. Secret information can then be leaked through a…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-02-03 Guangyuan Hu , Zecheng He , Ruby Lee