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Recent discovery of security attacks in advanced processors, known as Spectre and Meltdown, has resulted in high public alertness about security of hardware. The root cause of these attacks is information leakage across "covert channels"…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-12-13 Mohammad Rahmani Fadiheh , Dominik Stoffel , Clark Barrett , Subhasish Mitra , Wolfgang Kunz

Selective data protection is a promising technique to defend against the data leakage attack. In this paper, we revisit technical challenges that were neglected when applying this protection to real applications. These challenges include…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-06-01 Lin Ma , Jinyan Xu , Jiadong Sun , Yajin Zhou , Xun Xie , Wenbo Shen , Rui Chang , Kui Ren

Since the discovery of Spectre, a large number of hardware mechanisms for secure speculation has been proposed. Intuitively, more defensive mechanisms are less efficient but can securely execute a larger class of programs, while more…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-10-02 Marco Guarnieri , Boris Köpf , Jan Reineke , Pepe Vila

Speculative side-channel attacks access sensitive data and use transmitters to leak the data during wrong-path execution. Various defenses have been proposed to prevent such information leakage. However, not all speculatively executed…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-12-05 Pavlos Aimoniotis , Christos Sakalis , Magnus Själander , Stefanos Kaxiras

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-06-03 Bilal Ali Ahmad

To improve the overall performance of processors, computer architects use various performance optimization techniques in modern processors, such as speculative execution, branch prediction, and chaotic execution. Both now and in the future,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-08-31 Zhongkai Tong , Ziyuan Zhu , Yusha Zhang , Yuxin Liu , Dan Meng

Spectre attacks and their many subsequent variants are a new vulnerability class affecting modern CPUs. The attacks rely on the ability to misguide speculative execution, generally by exploiting the branch prediction structures, to execute…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-12-06 Esmaeil Mohammadian Koruyeh , Shirin Haji Amin Shirazi , Khaled N. Khasawneh , Chengyu Song , Nael Abu-Ghazaleh

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Subhash Sethumurugan , Hari Cherupalli , Kangjie Lu , John Sartori

Spectre attacks exploit speculative execution to leak sensitive information. In the last few years, a number of static side-channel detectors have been proposed to detect cache leakage in the presence of speculative execution. However,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-11-28 Ali Sahraee

Embedded software is developed under the assumption that hardware execution is always correct. Fault attacks break and exploit that assumption. Through the careful introduction of targeted faults, an adversary modifies the control-flow or…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-03-25 Bilgiday Yuce , Patrick Schaumont , Marc Witteman

Caches have been exploited to leak secret information due to the different times they take to handle memory accesses. Cache timing attacks include non-speculative cache side and covert channel attacks and cache-based speculative execution…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-04-23 Guangyuan Hu , Ruby B. Lee

The Spectre family of speculative execution attacks have required a rethinking of formal methods for security. Approaches based on operational speculative semantics have made initial inroads towards finding vulnerable code and validating…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-12-14 Hernán Ponce-de-León , Johannes Kinder

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-05-26 Guanhua Wang , Sudipta Chattopadhyay , Arnab Kumar Biswas , Tulika Mitra , Abhik Roychoudhury

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…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2019-02-15 Ross Mcilroy , Jaroslav Sevcik , Tobias Tebbi , Ben L. Titzer , Toon Verwaest

Side-channel attacks are a security exploit that take advantage of information leakage. They use measurement and analysis of physical parameters to reverse engineer and extract secrets from a system. Power analysis attacks in particular,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-07-26 Yun Chen , Ali Hajiabadi , Romain Poussier , Andreas Diavastos , Shivam Bhasin , Trevor E. Carlson

New hardware primitives such as Intel SGX secure a user-level process in presence of an untrusted or compromised OS. Such "enclaved execution" systems are vulnerable to several side-channels, one of which is the page fault channel. In this…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2016-01-13 Shweta Shinde , Zheng Leong Chua , Viswesh Narayanan , Prateek Saxena

Spectre and Meltdown attacks and their variants exploit hardware performance optimization features to cause security breaches. Secret information is accessed and leaked through covert or side channels. New attack variants keep appearing and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-12-24 Zecheng He , Guangyuan Hu , Ruby Lee

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-10-27 Chidera Biringa , Gaspard Baye , Gökhan Kul

The Spectre speculative side-channel attacks pose formidable threats for security. Research has shown that code following the cryptographic constant-time discipline can be efficiently protected against Spectre v1 using a selective variant…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Jonathan Baumann , Roberto Blanco , Léon Ducruet , Sebastian Harwig , Catalin Hritcu

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-08-18 Roberto Guanciale , Musard Balliu , Mads Dam