Related papers: Leaking Control Flow Information via the Hardware …
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…
Recently, out-of-order execution, an important performance optimization in modern high-end processors, has been revealed to pose a significant security threat, allowing information leaks across security domains. In particular, the Meltdown…
Caches on the modern commodity CPUs have become one of the major sources of side-channel leakages and been abused as a new attack vector. To thwart the cache-based side-channel attacks, two types of countermeasures have been proposed:…
Accelerators used for machine learning (ML) inference provide great performance benefits over CPUs. Securing confidential model in inference against off-chip side-channel attacks is critical in harnessing the performance advantage in…
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…
To meet the ever-growing need for performance in silicon devices, SoC providers have been increasingly relying on software-hardware cooperation. By controlling hardware resources such as power or clock management from the software,…
Recent transient-execution attacks, such as RIDL, Fallout, and ZombieLoad, demonstrated that attackers can leak information while it transits through microarchitectural buffers. Named Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) by Intel, these…
Side-channel attacks are a security exploit that take advantage of information leakage. They use measurement and analysis of physical parameters to reverse engineer and extract secrets from a system. Power analysis attacks in particular,…
The Least-Recently Used cache replacement policy and its variants are widely deployed in modern processors. This paper shows for the first time in detail that the LRU states of caches can be used to leak information: any access to a cache…
With the recent advancements in machine learning theory, many commercial embedded micro-processors use neural network models for a variety of signal processing applications. However, their associated side-channel security vulnerabilities…
To operate efficiently across a wide range of workloads with varying power requirements, a modern processor applies different current management mechanisms, which briefly throttle instruction execution while they adjust voltage and…
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…
Power-based side-channel is a serious security threat to the System on Chip (SoC). The secret information is leaked from the power profile of the system while a cryptographic algorithm is running. The mitigation requires efforts from both…
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"…
Flushing the cache, using instructions like clflush and wbinvd, is commonly proposed as a countermeasure against access-based cache attacks. In this report, we show that several Intel caches, specifically the L1 caches in some pre-Skylake…
The wide deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) has given rise to strong demands for optimizing their inference performance. Today's techniques serving this purpose primarily focus on reducing latency and improving throughput through…
While cryptographic algorithms such as the ubiquitous Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) are secure, *physical implementations* of these algorithms in hardware inevitably 'leak' sensitive data such as cryptographic keys. A particularly…
Recent work has shown that out-of-order and speculative execution mechanisms used to increase performance in the majority of processors expose the processors to critical attacks. These attacks, called Meltdown and Spectre, exploit the side…
The exponential growth of data traffic and the increasing complexity of networked applications demand effective solutions capable of passively inspecting and analysing the network traffic for monitoring and security purposes. Implementing…
The growing memory footprints of cloud and big data applications mean that data center CPUs can spend significant time waiting for memory. An attractive approach to improving performance in such centralized compute settings is to employ…