Related papers: LEASH: Enhancing Micro-architectural Attack Detect…

Cache side channel attacks are increasingly alarming in modern processors due to the recent emergence of Spectre and Meltdown attacks. A typical attack performs intentional cache access and manipulates cache states to leak secrets by…

Applications in science and engineering often require huge computational resources for solving problems within a reasonable time frame. Parallel supercomputers provide the computational infrastructure for solving such problems. A…

In spite of years of improvements to software security, heap-related attacks still remain a severe threat. One reason is that many existing memory allocators fall short in a variety of aspects. For instance, performance-oriented allocators…

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…

Anonymous microblogging systems are known to be vulnerable to intersection attacks due to network churn. An adversary that monitors all communications can leverage the churn to learn who is publishing what with increasing confidence over…

The recent Meltdown and Spectre attacks highlight the importance of automated verification techniques for identifying hardware security vulnerabilities. We have developed a tool for synthesizing microarchitecture-specific programs capable…

The use of annotations, referred to as assertions or contracts, to describe program properties for which run-time tests are to be generated, has become frequent in dynamic programing languages. However, the frameworks proposed to support…

Runahead execution is a technique to mask memory latency caused by irregular memory accesses. By pre-executing the application code during occurrences of long-latency operations and prefetching anticipated cache-missed data into the cache…

Adversarial extraction attacks constitute an insidious threat against Deep Learning (DL) models in-which an adversary aims to steal the architecture, parameters, and hyper-parameters of a targeted DL model. Existing extraction attack…

RISC-V processors are becoming ubiquitous in critical applications, but their susceptibility to microarchitectural side-channel attacks is a serious concern. Detection of microarchitectural attacks in RISC-V is an emerging research topic…

DRAM-based memory is a critical factor that creates a bottleneck on the system performance since the processor speed largely outperforms the DRAM latency. In this thesis, we develop a low-cost mechanism, called ChargeCache, which enables…

Recently discovered Spectre and meltdown attacks affects almost all processors by leaking confidential information to other processes through side-channel attacks. These vulnerabilities expose design flaws in the architecture of modern…

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…

Work-stealing is a widely used technique for balancing irregular parallel workloads, and most modern runtime systems adopt lock-free work-stealing deques to reduce contention and improve scalability. However, existing algorithms are…

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…

This paper shows how an attacker can break the confidentiality of a hardware enclave with Membuster, an off-chip attack based on snooping the memory bus. An attacker with physical access can observe an unencrypted address bus and extract…

The rapid adoption of large language models (LLMs) is pushing AI accelerators toward increasingly powerful and specialized designs. Instead of further complicating software development with deeply hierarchical scratchpad memories (SPMs) and…

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…

There is a growing need for hardware-software contracts which precisely define the implications of microarchitecture on software security-i.e., security contracts. It is our view that such contracts should explicitly account for…

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,…