Related papers: Fast Selective Flushing to Mitigate Contention-bas…
As cache-based side-channel attacks become serious security problems, various defenses have been proposed and deployed in both software and hardware. Consequently, cache-based side-channel attacks on processes co-residing on the same core…
Modern multicore processors are employing large last-level caches, for example Intel's E7-8800 processor uses 24MB L3 cache. Further, with each CMOS technology generation, leakage energy has been dramatically increasing and hence, leakage…
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…
OS-based page sharing is a commonly used optimization in modern systems to reduce memory footprint. Unfortunately, such sharing can cause Flush+Reload cache attacks, whereby a spy periodically flushes a cache line of shared data (using the…
Microarchitectural timing channels enable unwanted information flow across security boundaries, violating fundamental security assumptions. They leverage timing variations of several state-holding microarchitectural components and have been…
Randomizing the address-to-set mapping and partitioning of the cache has been shown to be an effective mechanism in designing secured caches. Several designs have been proposed on a variety of rationales: (1) randomized design, (2)…
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…
Creating and destroying threads on modern Linux systems incurs high latency, absent concurrency, and fails to scale as we increase concurrency. To address this concern we introduce a process-local cache of idle threads. Specifically,…
Rijndael algorithm was unanimously chosen as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) by the panel of researchers at National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in October 2000. Since then, Rijndael was destined to be used massively…
Modern distributed storage systems often use erasure codes to protect against disk and node failures to increase reliability, while trying to meet the latency requirements of the applications and clients. Storage systems may have caches at…
Speculation is key to achieving high CPU performance, yet it enables risks like Spectre attacks which remain a significant challenge to mitigate without incurring substantial performance overheads. These attacks typically unfold in three…
Timing side channels have been used to extract cryptographic keys and sensitive documents, even from trusted enclaves. In this paper, we focus on cache side channels created by access to shared code or data in the memory hierarchy. This…
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…
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…
Byte-addressable non-volatile main memory (NVM) demands transactional mechanisms to access and manipulate data on NVM atomically. Those transaction mechanisms often employ a logging mechanism (undo logging or redo logging). However, the…
Contemporary computing employs cache hierarchy to fill the speed gap between processors and main memories. In order to optimise system performance, Last Level Caches(LLC) are shared among all the cores. Cache sharing has made them an…
Rijndael was standardized in 2001 by National Institute of Standard and Technology as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). AES is still being used to encrypt financial, military and even government confidential data. In 2005, Bernstein…
The timing characteristics of cache, a high-speed storage between the fast CPU and the slowmemory, may reveal sensitive information of a program, thus allowing an adversary to conduct side-channel attacks. Existing methods for detecting…
New PCI-e flash cards and SSDs supporting over 100,000 IOPs are now available, with several usecases in the design of a high performance storage system. By using an array of flash chips, arranged in multiple banks, large capacities are…
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…