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In the main text published at USENIX Security 2025, we presented a systematic analysis of the role of cache occupancy in the design considerations for randomized caches (from the perspectives of performance and security). On the performance…
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…
Homomorphic encryption (HE) is a promising privacy-preserving technique for cross-silo federated learning (FL), where organizations perform collaborative model training on decentralized data. Despite the strong privacy guarantee, general HE…
We analyze quantitatively several strategies for better utilization of the {\em cache} or the {\em {fast access}} memory in computers. We define a performance factor $\alpha$ that denotes the fraction of the cache area utilized when the…
When compared to blocking concurrency, non-blocking concurrency can provide higher performance in parallel shared-memory contexts, especially in high contention scenarios. This paper proposes FLeeC, an application-level cache system based…
While many hardware accelerators have recently been proposed to address the inefficiency problem of fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) schemes, none of them is able to deliver optimal performance when facing real-world FHE workloads…
In cryptographic engineering, extensive attention has been devoted to ameliorating the performance and security of the algorithms within. Nonetheless, in the state-of-the-art, the approaches for increasing the reliability of the efficient…
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…
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…
The power consumption of a microprocessor is a huge channel for information leakage. While the most popular exploitation of this channel is to recover cryptographic keys from embedded devices, other applications such as mobile app…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in large-scale online services, enabling sophisticated applications. However, the computational overhead of generating key-value (KV) caches in the prefill stage presents a 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…
Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is a symmetric key encryption algorithm which is extensively used in secure electronic data transmission. When introduced, although it was tested and declared as secure, in 2005, a researcher named…
The transient execution attack is a type of attack leveraging the vulnerability of modern CPU optimization technologies. New attacks surface rapidly. The side-channel is a key part of transient execution attacks to leak data. In this work,…
In cost-sensitive deployments, RAID arrays may combine SSDs with different performance levels. Such heterogeneity arises when aging SSDs degrade yet remain usable, or when failed drives are replaced with new devices of explicitly better…
Performance degradation techniques are an important complement to side-channel attacks. In this work, we propose HyperDegrade -- a combination of previous approaches and the use of simultaneous multithreading (SMT) architectures. In…
Finding good configurations for a software system is often challenging since the number of configuration options can be large. Software engineers often make poor choices about configuration or, even worse, they usually use a sub-optimal…
There has been a significant increase in leakage energy dissipation of CMOS circuits with each technology generation. Further, due to their large size, last level caches (LLCs) spend a large fraction of their energy in the form of leakage…
In recent years, SSDs have gained tremendous attention in computing and storage systems due to significant performance improvement over HDDs. The cost per capacity of SSDs, however, prevents them from entirely replacing HDDs in such…
Time variation during program execution can leak sensitive information. Time variations due to program control flow and hardware resource contention have been used to steal encryption keys in cipher implementations such as AES and RSA. A…