Related papers: Chunked-Cache: On-Demand and Scalable Cache Isolat…

Randomized, skewed caches (RSCs) such as CEASER-S have recently received much attention to defend against contention-based cache side channels. By randomizing and regularly changing the mapping(s) of addresses to cache sets, these…

In the recent past, we have witnessed the shift towards attacks on the microarchitectural CPU level. In particular, cache side-channels play a predominant role as they allow an attacker to exfiltrate secret information by exploiting the CPU…

Modern computer processors use microarchitectural optimization mechanisms to improve performance. As a downside, such optimizations are prone to introducing side-channel vulnerabilities. Speculative loading of memory, called prefetching, is…

While there exist many isolation mechanisms that are available to cloud service providers, including virtual machines, containers, etc., the problem of side-channel increases in importance as a remaining security vulnerability, particularly…

Shared processor caches are vulnerable to conflict-based side-channel attacks, where an attacker can monitor access patterns of a victim by evicting victim cache lines using cache-set conflicts. Recent mitigations propose randomized mapping…

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…

We present a new hardware-agnostic side-channel attack that targets one of the most fundamental software caches in modern computer systems: the operating system page cache. The page cache is a pure software cache that contains all…

Covert channels can be utilized to secretly deliver information from high privileged processes to low privileged processes in the context of a high-assurance computing system. In this case study, we investigate the possibility of covert…

Intel SGX is known to be vulnerable to a class of practical attacks exploiting memory access pattern side-channels, notably page-fault attacks and cache timing attacks. A promising hardening scheme is to wrap applications in hardware…

Cloud computing has emerged as a corner stone of today's computing landscape. More and more customers who outsource their infrastructure benefit from the manageability, scalability and cost saving that come with cloud computing. Those…

Last-level cache (LLC) partitioning is a technique to provide temporal isolation and low worst-case latency (WCL) bounds when cores access the shared LLC in multicore safety-critical systems. A typical approach to cache partitioning…

Side channel attacks are a major class of attacks to crypto-systems. Attackers collect and analyze timing behavior, I/O data, or power consumption in these systems to undermine their effectiveness in protecting sensitive information. In…

In the last two decades, the evolving cyber-threat landscape has brought to center stage the contentious tradeoffs between the security and performance of modern microprocessors. The guarantees provided by the hardware to ensure no…

The growth of cloud computing has revolutionized data processing and storage capacities to another levels of scalability and flexibility. But in the process, it has created a huge challenge of security, especially in terms of safeguarding…

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…

Data distribution for opportunistic users is challenging as they neither own the computing resources they are using or any nearby storage. Users are motivated to use opportunistic computing to expand their data processing capacity, but they…

Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) enhances the security of mobile applications and cloud services by isolating sensitive code in the secure world from the non-secure normal world. However, TEE applications are still confronted with…

Dynamic partial reconfiguration enables multi-tenancy in cloud-based FPGAs, which presents security challenges for tenants, IPs, and data. Malicious users can exploit FPGAs for remote side-channel attacks (SCAs), and shared on-chip…

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…

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:…