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Discovering new vulnerabilities and implementing security and privacy measures are important to protect systems and data against physical attacks. One such vulnerability is impedance, an inherent property of a device that can be exploited…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-12-15 Md Sadik Awal , Md Tauhidur Rahman

Transient Execution Attacks (TEAs) have gradually become a major security threat to modern high-performance processors. They exploit the vulnerability of speculative execution to illegally access private data, and transmit them through…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-04-18 Bowen Tang , Chenggang Wu , Pen-Chung Yew , Yinqian Zhang , Mengyao Xie , Yuanming Lai , Yan Kang , Wei Wang , Qiang Wei , Zhe Wang

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

Speculative execution attacks undermine the security of constant-time programming, the standard technique used to prevent microarchitectural side channels in security-sensitive software such as cryptographic code. Constant-time code must…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-12-18 Rutvik Choudhary , Alan Wang , Zirui Neil Zhao , Adam Morrison , Christopher W. Fletcher

Side-channel attacks such as Spectre that utilize speculative execution to steal application secrets pose a significant threat to modern computing systems. While program transformations can mitigate some Spectre attacks, more advanced…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-03-27 Zhuojia Shen , Jie Zhou , Divya Ojha , John Criswell

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…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Chaoqun Shen , Gang Qu , Jiliang Zhang

Side-channel attacks exploit variations in non-functional behaviors to expose sensitive information across security boundaries. Existing methods leverage side-channels based on power consumption, electromagnetic radiation, silicon substrate…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Sahan Sanjaya , Aruna Jayasena , Prabhat Mishra

An extensive line of work on modern computing architectures has shown that the execution time of instructions can (i) depend on the operand of the instruction or (ii) be influenced by system optimizations, e.g., branch prediction and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Annika Wilde , Samira Briongos , Claudio Soriente , Ghassan Karame

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-06-03 Bilal Ali Ahmad

This paper introduces a run-time mechanism for preventing leakage of secure information in distributed systems. We consider a general concurrency language model, where concurrent objects interact by asynchronous method calls and futures.…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2020-02-26 Farzane Karami , Olaf Owe , Gerardo Schneider

Error invariants are assertions that over-approximate the reachable program states at a given position in an error trace while only capturing states that will still lead to failure if execution of the trace is continued from that position.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2016-08-31 Andreas Holzer , Daniel Schwartz-Narbonne , Mitra Tabaei Befrouei , Georg Weissenbacher , Thomas Wies

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-10-27 Chidera Biringa , Gaspard Baye , Gökhan Kul

In this work, we identify a set of side-channels in our Confidential Federated Compute platform that a hypothetical insider could exploit to circumvent differential privacy (DP) guarantees. We show how DP can mitigate two of the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-24 James Bell-Clark , Albert Cheu , Adria Gascon , Jonathan Katz

CPU cache is a limited but crucial storage component in modern processors, whereas the cache timing side-channel may inadvertently leak information through the physically measurable timing variance. Speculative execution, an essential…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-02-18 Shengjian Guo , Yueqi Chen , Peng Li , Yueqiang Cheng , Huibo Wang , Meng Wu , Zhiqiang Zuo

Side-channel and fault injection attacks reveal secret information by monitoring or manipulating the physical effects of computations involving secret variables. Circuit-level countermeasures help to deter these attacks, and traditionally…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-06-28 Yuan Yao , Pantea Kiaei , Richa Singh , Shahin Tajik , Patrick Schaumont

In wireless networks, the rate achieved depends on factors like level of interference, hardware impairments, and channel gain. Often, instantaneous values of some of these factors can be measured, and they provide useful information about…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-02-24 Manjesh K. Hanawal , Sumit J. Darak

Whenever modern CPUs encounter a conditional branch for which the condition cannot be evaluated yet, they predict the likely branch target and speculatively execute code. Such pipelining is key to optimizing runtime performance and is…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-01-15 Giorgi Maisuradze , Christian Rossow

Transient execution attacks utilize micro-architectural covert channels to leak secrets that should not have been accessible during logical program execution. Commonly used micro-architectural covert channels are those that leave lasting…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Jacob Fustos , Michael Bechtel , Heechul Yun

Side-channel information leakage is a known limitation of SGX. Researchers have demonstrated that secret-dependent information can be extracted from enclave execution through page-fault access patterns. Consequently, various recent research…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2017-02-27 Ferdinand Brasser , Urs Müller , Alexandra Dmitrienko , Kari Kostiainen , Srdjan Capkun , Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi

This paper introduces Okapi, a new hardware/software cross-layer architecture designed to mitigate Transient Execution Side Channel attacks, including Spectre variants, in modern computing systems. Okapi provides a hardware basis for secure…