Related papers: SoK: Hardware Defenses Against Speculative Executi…

This systematic literature review surveys technical defenses against software-based cheating in online multiplayer games. Categorizing existing approach-es into server-side detection, client-side anti-tamper, kernel-level anti-cheat…

Opaque predicates are a well-established fundamental building block for software obfuscation. Simplified, an opaque predicate implements an expression that provides constant Boolean output, but appears to have dynamic behavior for static…

Backdoor attacks pose a significant threat to deep learning models by implanting hidden vulnerabilities that can be activated by malicious inputs. While numerous defenses have been proposed to mitigate these attacks, the heterogeneous…

Machine learning (ML) models can be trade secrets due to their development cost. Hence, they need protection against malicious forms of reverse engineering (e.g., in IP piracy). With a growing shift of ML to the edge devices, in part for…

SpecFuzz is the first tool that enables dynamic testing for speculative execution vulnerabilities (e.g., Spectre). The key is a novel concept of speculation exposure: The program is instrumented to simulate speculative execution in software…

Obfuscation is a technique for protecting hardware intellectual property (IP) blocks against reverse engineering, piracy, and malicious modifications. Current obfuscation efforts mainly focus on functional locking of a design to prevent…

Modern processors have suffered a deluge of threats exploiting branch instruction collisions inside the branch prediction unit (BPU), from eavesdropping on secret-related branch operations to triggering malicious speculative executions.…

Side-channel attacks such as Spectre that utilize speculative execution to steal application secrets pose a significant threat to modern computing systems. While program transformations can mitigate some Spectre attacks, more advanced…

Spectre v1 attacks, which exploit conditional branch misprediction, are often identified with attacks that bypass array bounds checking to leak data from a victim's memory. Generally, however, Spectre v1 attacks can exploit any conditional…

Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) play a critical role in the industrial control systems. Vulnerabilities in PLC programs might lead to attacks causing devastating consequences to the critical infrastructure, as shown in Stuxnet and…

Many security and software testing applications require checking whether certain properties of a program hold for any possible usage scenario. For instance, a tool for identifying software vulnerabilities may need to rule out the existence…

We propose the concept of Speculative Execution for Visual Analytics and discuss its effectiveness for model exploration and optimization. Speculative Execution enables the automatic generation of alternative, competing model configurations…

Malware attacks are a significant part of the new software security threats detected each year. Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) are a set of hardware instructions introduced by Intel in their recent lines of processors that are…

System passwords serve as critical credentials for user authentication and access control when logging into operating systems or applications. Upon entering a valid password, users pass verification to access system resources and execute…

The development of quantum computers has been advancing rapidly in recent years. As quantum computers become more widely accessible, potentially malicious users could try to execute their code on the machines to leak information from other…

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.…

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…

Machine learning (ML) models cannot neglect risks to security, privacy, and fairness. Several defenses have been proposed to mitigate such risks. When a defense is effective in mitigating one risk, it may correspond to increased or…

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…

Timing-based side and covert channels in processor caches continue to be a threat to modern computers. This work shows for the first time a systematic, large-scale analysis of Arm devices and the detailed results of attacks the processors…