Related papers: Microarchitectural Leakage Templates and Their App…

Microarchitectural side channels expose unprotected software to information leakage attacks where a software adversary is able to track runtime behavior of a benign process and steal secrets such as cryptographic keys. As suggested by…

Side-channel attacks have become a severe threat to the confidentiality of computer applications and systems. One popular type of such attacks is the microarchitectural attack, where the adversary exploits the hardware features to break the…

Cache template attacks demonstrated automated leakage of user input in shared libraries. However, for large binaries, the runtime is prohibitively high. Other automated approaches focused on cryptographic implementations and media software…

This work presents a new tool to verify the correctness of cryptographic implementations with respect to cache attacks. Our methodology discovers vulnerabilities that are hard to find with other techniques, observed as exploitable leakage.…

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…

How will future microarchitectures impact the security of existing cryptographic implementations? As we cannot keep reducing the size of transistors, chip vendors have started developing new microarchitectural optimizations to speed up…

Side-channel attacks on shared hardware resources increasingly threaten confidentiality, especially with the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs). In this work, we introduce Spill The Beans, a novel application of cache side-channels to…

Secret-dependent timing behavior in cryptographic implementations has resulted in exploitable vulnerabilities, undermining their security. Over the years, numerous tools to automatically detect timing leakage or even to prove their absence…

With the recent advancements in machine learning theory, many commercial embedded micro-processors use neural network models for a variety of signal processing applications. However, their associated side-channel security vulnerabilities…

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…

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…

Timing channels are information flows, encoded in the relative timing of events, that bypass the system's protection mechanisms. Any microarchitectural state that depends on execution history and affects the rate of progress of later…

Modern processor designs use a variety of microarchitectural methods to achieve high performance. Unfortunately, new side-channels have often been uncovered that exploit these enhanced designs. One area that has received little attention…

Cache side channel attacks are increasingly alarming in modern processors due to the recent emergence of Spectre and Meltdown attacks. A typical attack performs intentional cache access and manipulates cache states to leak secrets by…

Modern computer processors use microarchitectural optimization mechanisms to improve performance. As a downside, such optimizations are prone to introducing side-channel vulnerabilities. Speculative loading of memory, called prefetching, is…

Security critical software, e.g., OpenSSL, comes with numerous side-channel leakages left unpatched due to a lack of resources or experts. The situation will only worsen as the pace of code development accelerates, with developers relying…

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…

Caches on the modern commodity CPUs have become one of the major sources of side-channel leakages and been abused as a new attack vector. To thwart the cache-based side-channel attacks, two types of countermeasures have been proposed:…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in sensitive domains including healthcare, legal services, and confidential communications, where privacy is paramount. This paper introduces Whisper Leak, a side-channel attack that…

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…