Related papers: CVA6's Data cache: Structure and Behavior

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 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…

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…

The recent discovery of the Spectre and Meltdown attacks represents a watershed moment not just for the field of Computer Security, but also of Programming Languages. This paper explores speculative side-channel attacks and their…

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…

Timing-based side and covert channels in processor caches continue to be a threat to modern computers. This work shows for the first time a systematic, large-scale analysis of Arm devices and the detailed results of attacks the processors…

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…

With the exponential rise in the use of cloud services, smart devices, and IoT devices, advanced cyber attacks have become increasingly sophisticated and ubiquitous. Furthermore, the rapid evolution of computing architectures and memory…

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…

Open-source RISC-V cores are increasingly adopted in high-end embedded domains such as automotive, where maximizing instructions per cycle (IPC) is becoming critical. Building on the industry-supported open-source CVA6 core and its…

Research on transient execution attacks including Spectre and Meltdown showed that exception or branch misprediction events might leave secret-dependent traces in the CPU's microarchitectural state. This observation led to a proliferation…

While interest in the open RISC-V instruction set architecture is growing, tools to assess the security of concrete processor implementations are lacking. There are dedicated tools and benchmarks for common microarchitectural side-channel…

Virtualization is a key technology used in a wide range of applications, from cloud computing to embedded systems. Over the last few years, mainstream computer architectures were extended with hardware virtualization support, giving rise to…

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…

Cache attacks exploit memory access patterns of cryptographic implementations. Constant-Time implementation techniques have become an indispensable tool in fighting cache timing attacks. These techniques engineer the memory accesses of…

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…

In the last 10 years, cache attacks on Intel x86 CPUs have gained increasing attention among the scientific community and powerful techniques to exploit cache side channels have been developed. However, modern smartphones use one or more…

In modern server CPUs, the Last-Level Cache (LLC) serves not only as a victim cache for higher-level private caches but also as a buffer for low-latency DMA transfers between CPU cores and I/O devices through Direct Cache Access (DCA).…

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…

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:…