Related papers: Software Mitigation of RISC-V Spectre Attacks

RISC-V, an open instruction set architecture, is getting the attention of soft processor developers. Implementing only a basic 32-bit integer instruction set of RISC-V, which is defined as RV32I, might be satisfactory for embedded systems.…

With the rapid development of scientific computation, more and more researchers and developers are committed to implementing various workloads/operations on different devices. Among all these devices, NVIDIA GPU is the most popular choice…

As RISC-V architectures proliferate across embedded and high-performance domains, developers face persistent challenges in performance optimization due to fragmented tooling, immature hardware features, and platform-specific defects. This…

This work evaluates how well hardware-based approaches detect stack buffer overflow (SBO) attacks in RISC-V systems. We conducted simulations on the PULP platform and examined micro-architecture events using semi-supervised anomaly…

Embedded and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices are ubiquitous today, and the uprising of several botnets based on them (e.g., Mirai, Ripple20) raises issues about the security of such devices. Especially low-power devices often lack support…

We propose ProSpeCT, a generic formal processor model providing provably secure speculation for the constant-time policy. For constant-time programs under a non-speculative semantics, ProSpeCT guarantees that speculative and out-of-order…

Multi-tenant computing platforms are typically comprised of several software and hardware components including platform firmware, host operating system kernel, virtualization monitor, and the actual tenant payloads that run on them…

Transient execution attacks, also called speculative execution attacks, have drawn much interest as they exploit the transient execution of instructions, e.g., during branch prediction, to leak data. Transient execution is fundamental to…

Attacks based on side-channel analysis (SCA) pose a severe security threat to modern computing platforms, further exacerbated on IoT devices by their pervasiveness and handling of private and critical data. Designing SCA-resistant computing…

Embedded systems are pervasively used in many fields nowadays. In mixed-criticality environments (automotive, industry 4.0, drones, etc.) they need to run real-time applications with certain time and safety constraints alongside a rich…

While microprocessors are used in various applications, they are precluded from the use in high-energy physics applications due to the harsh radiation present. To overcome this limitation a microprocessor design must withstand high doses of…

Rising device use and third-party IP integration in semiconductors raise security concerns. Unauthorized access, fault injection, and privacy invasion are potential threats from untrusted actors. Different security techniques have been…

Microcode is an abstraction layer used by modern x86 processors that interprets user-visible CISC instructions to hardware-internal RISC instructions. The capability to update x86 microcode enables a vendor to modify CPU behavior in-field,…

SpecFuzz is the first tool that enables dynamic testing for speculative execution vulnerabilities (e.g., Spectre). The key is a novel concept of speculation exposure: The program is instrumented to simulate speculative execution in software…

We propose using reinforcement learning to address the challenges of discovering microarchitectural vulnerabilities, such as Spectre and Meltdown, which exploit subtle interactions in modern processors. Traditional methods like random…

Side-channel attacks such as Spectre that utilize speculative execution to steal application secrets pose a significant threat to modern computing systems. While program transformations can mitigate some Spectre attacks, more advanced…

The importance of preventing microarchitectural timing side channels in security-critical applications has surged in recent years. Constant-time programming has emerged as a best-practice technique for preventing the leakage of secret…

The MiG-V was designed for high-security applications and is the first commercially available logic-locked RISC-V processor on the market. In this context logic locking was used to protect the RISC-V processor design during the untrusted…

The current challenges in technology scaling are pushing the semiconductor industry towards hardware specialization, creating a proliferation of heterogeneous systems-on-chip, delivering orders of magnitude performance and power benefits…

This paper presents a novel, non-standard set of vector instruction types for exploring custom SIMD instructions in a softcore. The new types allow simultaneous access to a relatively high number of operands, reducing the instruction count…