Related papers: CacheFX: A Framework for Evaluating Cache Security

Caches have become the prime method for unintended information extraction across logical isolation boundaries. Even Spectre and Meltdown rely on the cache side channel, as it provides great resolution and is widely available on all major…

Shared caches are vulnerable to side channel attacks through contention in cache sets. Besides being a simple source of information leak, these side channels form useful gadgets for more sophisticated attacks that compromise the security of…

While side-channel leakage is traditionally evaluated from a fabricated chip, it is more time-efficient and cost-effective to do so during the design phase of the chip. We present a methodology to rank the gates of a design according to…

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…

Modern computer architectures rely on caches to reduce the latency gap between the CPU and main memory. While indispensable for performance, caches pose a serious threat to security because they leak information about memory access patterns…

Caches are used to reduce the speed differential between the CPU and memory to improve the performance of modern processors. However, attackers can use contention-based cache timing attacks to steal sensitive information from victim…

Timing and cache side channels provide powerful attacks against many sensitive operations including cryptographic implementations. Existing defenses cannot protect against all classes of such attacks without incurring prohibitive…

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…

We present a kernel-level infrastructure that allows system-wide detection of malicious applications attempting to exploit cache-based side-channel attacks to break the process confinement enforced by standard operating systems. This…

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…

Cause-effect chains, as a widely used modeling method in real-time embedded systems, are extensively applied in various safety-critical domains. End-to-end latency, as a key real-time attribute of cause-effect chains, is crucial in many…

Cache attacks pose a threat to any code whose execution flow or memory accesses depend on sensitive information. Especially in public clouds, where caches are shared across several tenants, cache attacks remain an unsolved problem. Cache…

Many cache designs have been proposed to guard against contention-based side-channel attacks. One well-known type of cache is the randomized remapping cache. Many randomized remapping caches provide fixed or over protection, which leads to…

Microarchitectural side channel attacks have been very prominent in security research over the last few years. Caches have been an outstanding covert channel, as they provide high resolution and generic cross-core leakage even with simple…

Modern x86 processors have many prefetch instructions that can be used by programmers to boost performance. However, these instructions may also cause security problems. In particular, we found that on Intel processors, there are two…

CPUs provide isolation mechanisms like virtualization and privilege levels to protect software. Yet these focus on architectural isolation while typically overlooking microarchitectural side channels, exemplified by Meltdown and Foreshadow.…

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:…

Network slicing in 5G and the future 6G networks will enable the creation of multiple virtualized networks on a shared physical infrastructure. This innovative approach enables the provision of tailored networks to accommodate specific…

The last level cache is vulnerable to timing based side channel attacks because it is shared by the attacker and the victim processes even if they are located on different cores. These timing attacks evict the victim cache lines using small…

To defend against conflict-based cache side-channel attacks, cache partitioning or remapping techniques were proposed to prevent set conflicts between different security domains or obfuscate the locations of such conflicts. But such…