Related papers: Microarchitectural Leakage Templates and Their App…

We systematize software side-channel attacks with a focus on vulnerabilities and countermeasures in the cryptographic implementations. Particularly, we survey past research literature to categorize vulnerable implementations, and identify…

Large language models (LLMs) possess extensive knowledge and question-answering capabilities, having been widely deployed in privacy-sensitive domains like finance and medical consultation. During LLM inferences, cache-sharing methods are…

The implementations of most hardened cryptographic libraries use defensive programming techniques for side-channel resistance. These techniques are usually specified as guidelines to developers on specific code patterns to use or avoid.…

Microarchitectural attacks on CPU structures have been studied in native applications, as well as in web browsers. These attacks continue to be a substantial threat to computing systems at all scales. With the proliferation of heterogeneous…

In this paper, we reveal the existence of a new class of prefetcher, the XPT prefetcher, in the modern Intel processors which has never been officially documented. It speculatively issues a load, bypassing last-level cache (LLC) lookups,…

The recent Spectre attacks has demonstrated the fundamental insecurity of current computer microarchitecture. The attacks use features like pipelining, out-of-order and speculation to extract arbitrary information about the memory contents…

Side-channel attacks exploit unintended information leakage from system behavior and continue to pose serious privacy risks in modern platforms. Despite extensive prior work, side-channel analysis remains largely manual and fragmented,…

Leakage contracts have recently been proposed as a new security abstraction at the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) level. Such contracts aim to faithfully capture the information processors may leak through side effects of their…

While cryptographic algorithms such as the ubiquitous Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) are secure, *physical implementations* of these algorithms in hardware inevitably 'leak' sensitive data such as cryptographic keys. A particularly…

In software development environments, code quality is crucial. This study aims to assist Machine Learning (ML) engineers in enhancing their code by identifying and correcting Data Leakage issues within their models. Data Leakage occurs when…

Confidential virtual machines (CVMs) based on trusted execution environments (TEEs) enable new privacy-preserving solutions. Yet, they leave side-channel leakage outside their threat model, shifting the responsibility of mitigating such…

Cache-based side channels enable a dedicated attacker to reveal program secrets by measuring the cache access patterns. Practical attacks have been shown against real-world crypto algorithm implementations such as RSA, AES, and ElGamal. By…

Large Language Models (LLMs) enable a new ecosystem with many downstream applications, called LLM applications, with different natural language processing tasks. The functionality and performance of an LLM application highly depend on its…

Code quality is of paramount importance in all types of software development settings. Our work seeks to enable Machine Learning (ML) engineers to write better code by helping them find and fix instances of Data Leakage in their models.…

Transient execution attacks have been one of the widely explored microarchitectural side channels since the discovery of Spectre and Meltdown. However, much of the research has been driven by manual discovery of new transient paths through…

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…

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…

Side-channel attacks on microprocessors, like the RISC-V, exhibit security vulnerabilities that lead to several design challenges. Hence, it is imperative to study and analyze these security vulnerabilities comprehensively. In this paper,…

Cryptographic research takes software timing side channels seriously. Approaches to mitigate them include constant-time coding and techniques to enforce such practices. However, recent attacks like Meltdown [42], Spectre [37], and…

Spectre attacks disclosed in early 2018 expose data leakage scenarios via cache side channels. Specifically, speculatively executed paths due to branch mis-prediction may bring secret data into the cache which are then exposed via cache…