Related papers: Microarchitectural Leakage Templates and Their App…
There is a growing need for hardware-software contracts which precisely define the implications of microarchitecture on software security-i.e., security contracts. It is our view that such contracts should explicitly account for…
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.…
The code generation modules inside modern compilers such as GCC and LLVM, which use a limited number of CPU registers to store a large number of program variables, may introduce side-channel leaks even in software equipped with…
Side-channel attacks have become prominent attack surfaces in cyberspace. Attackers use the side information generated by the system while performing a task. Among the various side-channel attacks, cache side-channel attacks are leading as…
Compression algorithms are widely used as they save memory without losing data. However, elimination of redundant symbols and sequences in data leads to a compression side channel. So far, compression attacks have only focused on the…
Transient execution attacks utilize micro-architectural covert channels to leak secrets that should not have been accessible during logical program execution. Commonly used micro-architectural covert channels are those that leave lasting…
Various studies among side-channel attacks have tried to extract information through leakages from electronic devices to reach the instruction flow of some appliances. However, previous methods highly depend on the resolution of traced…
The recent discovery of the Spectre and Meltdown attacks represents a watershed moment not just for the field of Computer Security, but also of Programming Languages. This paper explores speculative side-channel attacks and their…
Traditional side-channels take advantage of secrets being used as inputs to unsafe instructions, used for memory accesses, or used in control flow decisions. Constant-time programming, which restricts such code patterns, has been widely…
We present a software approach to mitigate access-driven side-channel attacks that leverage last-level caches (LLCs) shared across cores to leak information between security domains (e.g., tenants in a cloud). Our approach dynamically…
Modern x86 processors have many prefetch instructions that can be used by programmers to boost performance. However, these instructions may also cause security problems. In particular, we found that on Intel processors, there are two…
In the last years, a series of side channels have been discovered on CPUs. These side channels have been used in powerful attacks, e.g., on cryptographic implementations, or as building blocks in transient-execution attacks such as Spectre…
Microarchitectural side channel attacks have been very prominent in security research over the last few years. Caches have been an outstanding covert channel, as they provide high resolution and generic cross-core leakage even with simple…
Meltdown and Spectre exploit microarchitectural changes the CPU makes during transient out-of-order execution. Using side-channel techniques, these attacks enable leaking arbitrary data from memory. As state-of-the-art software mitigations…
Although cryptographic algorithms may be mathematically secure, it is often possible to leak secret information from the implementation of the algorithms. Timing and power side-channel vulnerabilities are some of the most widely considered…
Spectre, Meltdown, and related attacks have demonstrated that kernels, hypervisors, trusted execution environments, and browsers are prone to information disclosure through micro-architectural weaknesses. However, it remains unclear as to…
Spectre intrusions exploit speculative execution design vulnerabilities in modern processors. The attacks violate the principles of isolation in programs to gain unauthorized private user information. Current state-of-the-art detection…
Accelerators used for machine learning (ML) inference provide great performance benefits over CPUs. Securing confidential model in inference against off-chip side-channel attacks is critical in harnessing the performance advantage in…
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…
This paper evaluates new security threats due to the processor frontend in modern Intel processors. The root causes of the security threats are the multiple paths in the processor frontend that the micro-operations can take: through the…