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To meet the ever-growing need for performance in silicon devices, SoC providers have been increasingly relying on software-hardware cooperation. By controlling hardware resources such as power or clock management from the software,…

Cache randomization has recently been revived as a promising defense against conflict-based cache side-channel attacks. As two of the latest implementations, CEASER-S and ScatterCache both claim to thwart conflict-based cache side-channel…

Modern processors are highly optimized systems where every single cycle of computation time matters. Many optimizations depend on the data that is being processed. Software-based microarchitectural attacks exploit effects of these…

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…

We introduce the first microarchitectural side channel attacks that leverage contention on the CPU ring interconnect. There are two challenges that make it uniquely difficult to exploit this channel. First, little is known about the ring…

The last level cache is vulnerable to timing based side channel attacks because it is shared by the attacker and the victim processes even if they are located on different cores. These timing attacks evict the victim cache lines using small…

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…

Memory-disk synchronization is a critical technology for ensuring data correctness, integrity, and security, especially in systems that handle sensitive information like financial transactions and medical records. We propose SYNC+SYNC, a…

In the last two decades, the evolving cyber-threat landscape has brought to center stage the contentious tradeoffs between the security and performance of modern microprocessors. The guarantees provided by the hardware to ensure no…

While there exist many isolation mechanisms that are available to cloud service providers, including virtual machines, containers, etc., the problem of side-channel increases in importance as a remaining security vulnerability, particularly…

Large Language Models (LLMs) that can be deployed locally have recently gained popularity for privacy-sensitive tasks, with companies such as Meta, Google, and Intel playing significant roles in their development. However, the security of…

Timing and cache side channels provide powerful attacks against many sensitive operations including cryptographic implementations. Existing defenses cannot protect against all classes of such attacks without incurring prohibitive…

To improve efficiency, nearly all parallel processing units (CPUs and GPUs) implement relaxed memory models in which memory operations may be re-ordered, i.e., executed out-of-order. Prior testing work in this area found that memory…

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…

In cloud computing environments, multiple tenants are often co-located on the same multi-processor system. Thus, preventing information leakage between tenants is crucial. While the hypervisor enforces software isolation, shared hardware,…

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…

Spin Transfer Torque RAM (STTRAM) is a promising candidate for Last Level Cache (LLC) due to high endurance, high density and low leakage. One of the major disadvantages of STTRAM is high write latency and write current. Additionally, the…

Recent studies highlighting the vulnerability of computer architecture to information leakage attacks have been a cause of significant concern. Among the various classes of microarchitectural attacks, cache timing channels are especially…

Trusted execution environments (TEEs) provide an environment for running workloads in the cloud without having to trust cloud service providers, by offering additional hardware-assisted security guarantees. However, main memory encryption…

Covert channels are communication channels used by attackers to transmit information from a compromised system when the access control policy of the system does not allow doing so. Previous work has shown that CPU frequency scaling can be…