Related papers: PMUSpill: The Counters in Performance Monitor Unit…
Modern processors widely equip the Performance Monitoring Unit (PMU) to collect various architecture and microarchitecture events. Software developers often utilize the PMU to enhance program's performance, but the potential side effects…
Performance Monitoring Unit (PMU) is a common hardware module in Intel CPUs. It can be used to record various CPU behaviors therefore it is often used for performance analysis and optimization. Of the 65536 event spaces, Intel has…
We introduce a new timing side-channel attack on Intel CPU processors. Our Frontal attack exploits timing differences that arise from how the CPU frontend fetches and processes instructions while being interrupted. In particular, we observe…
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,…
Memory protection units (MPUs) are hardware-assisted security features that are commonly used in embedded processors such as the ARM 940T, Infineon TC1775, and Xilinx Zynq. MPUs partition the memory statically, and set individual protection…
Phasor measurement units (PMUs) provide high-fidelity data that improve situation awareness of electric power grid operations. PMU datastreams inform wide-area state estimation, monitor area control error, and facilitate event detection in…
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…
Real-time transient event identification is essential for power system situational awareness and protection. The increased penetration of Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) enhance power system visualization and real time monitoring and…
Apart from the actual CPU, modern server motherboards contain other auxiliary components, for example voltage regulators for power management. Those are connected to the CPU and the separate Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) via the…
The ability to collect statistics about the execution of a program within a CPU is of the utmost importance across all fields of computing since it allows characterizing the timing performance of a program. This capability is even more…
LLM-integrated applications are vulnerable to prompt injection attacks, where an attacker contaminates the input to inject malicious instructions, causing the LLM to follow the attacker's intent instead of the original user's. Existing…
Modern processors have suffered a deluge of threats exploiting branch instruction collisions inside the branch prediction unit (BPU), from eavesdropping on secret-related branch operations to triggering malicious speculative executions.…
The transient-execution attack Meltdown leaks sensitive information by transiently accessing inaccessible data during out-of-order execution. Although Meltdown is fixed in hardware for recent CPU generations, most currently-deployed CPUs…
Transient execution attacks that exploit speculation have raised significant concerns in computer systems. Typically, branch predictors are leveraged to trigger mis-speculation in transient execution attacks. In this work, we demonstrate a…
Trusted Platform Module (TPM) serves as a hardware-based root of trust that protects cryptographic keys from privileged system and physical adversaries. In this work, we perform a black-box timing analysis of TPM 2.0 devices deployed on…
Recent discovery of security attacks in advanced processors, known as Spectre and Meltdown, has resulted in high public alertness about security of hardware. The root cause of these attacks is information leakage across "covert channels"…
Modern processors use branch prediction and speculative execution to maximize performance. For example, if the destination of a branch depends on a memory value that is in the process of being read, CPUs will try guess the destination and…
The Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) is an important metering device for smart grid. Like any other Intelligent Electronic Device (IED), PMUs are prone to various types of cyberattacks. However, one form of attack is unique to the PMU, the…
Modern chip designs are increasingly complex, making it difficult for developers to glean meaningful insights about hardware behavior while real workloads are running. Hardware introspection aims to solve this by enabling the hardware…
Hardware (HW) security issues have been emerging at an alarming rate in recent years. Transient execution attacks, in particular, pose a genuine threat to the security of modern computing systems. Despite recent advances, understanding the…