Related papers: Write Me and I'll Tell You Secrets -- Write-After-…

Recent security vulnerabilities that target speculative execution (e.g., Spectre) present a significant challenge for processor design. The highly publicized vulnerability uses speculative execution to learn victim secrets by changing cache…

Power side-channel attacks are a very effective cryptanalysis technique that can infer secret keys of security ICs by monitoring the power consumption. Since the emergence of practical attacks in the late 90s, they have been a major threat…

The wide deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) has given rise to strong demands for optimizing their inference performance. Today's techniques serving this purpose primarily focus on reducing latency and improving throughput through…

We consider the wiretap channel, where the individual channel uses have memory or are influenced by an adversary. We analyze the explicit and computationally efficient construction of information-theoretically secure coding schemes which…

Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) have been proposed as a solution to protect code confidentiality in scenarios where computation is outsourced to an untrusted operator. We study the resilience of such solutions to side-channel attacks…

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…

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…

Microarchitectural timing side channels have been thoroughly investigated as a security threat in hardware designs featuring shared buffers (e.g., caches) or parallelism between attacker and victim task execution. However, contradicting…

Data-dependent access patterns of an application to an untrusted storage system are notorious for leaking sensitive information about the user's data. Previous research has shown how an adversary capable of monitoring both read and write…

Cache side-channel attacks extract secrets by examining how victim software accesses cache. To date, practical attacks on cryptosystems and media libraries are demonstrated under different scenarios, inferring secret keys and reconstructing…

Timing channels in cache hierarchies are an important enabler in many microarchitectural attacks. ScatterCache (USENIX 2019) is a protected cache architecture that randomizes the address-to-index mapping with a keyed cryptographic function,…

Research on transient execution attacks including Spectre and Meltdown showed that exception or branch misprediction events might leave secret-dependent traces in the CPU's microarchitectural state. This observation led to a proliferation…

Side-channel attacks (SCAs), which infer secret information (for example secret keys) by exploiting information that leaks from the implementation (such as power consumption), have been shown to be a non-negligible threat to modern…

CPUs provide isolation mechanisms like virtualization and privilege levels to protect software. Yet these focus on architectural isolation while typically overlooking microarchitectural side channels, exemplified by Meltdown and Foreshadow.…

As power consumption from AI training and inference continues to increase, AI accelerators are being integrated directly into the CPU. Intel's Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) is one such example, debuting on the 4th generation Intel Xeon…

Covert channel attacks have been continuously studied as severe threats to modern computing systems. Software-based covert channels are a typically hard-to-detect branch of these attacks, since they leverage virtual resources to establish…

Many storage channels admit reading and rewriting of the content at a given cost. We consider rewritable channels with a hidden state which models the unknown characteristics of the memory cell. In addition to mitigating the effect of the…

Physical side channels emerge from the relation between internal computation or data with observable physical parameters of a chip. Previous works mostly focus on properties related to current consumption such as power consumption. The…

Since 2016, multiple microarchitectural attacks have exploited an effect that is attributed to prefetching. These works observe that certain user-space operations can fetch kernel addresses into the cache. Fetching user-inaccessible data…

In the last 10 years, cache attacks on Intel x86 CPUs have gained increasing attention among the scientific community and powerful techniques to exploit cache side channels have been developed. However, modern smartphones use one or more…