Related papers: SoK: Hardware Defenses Against Speculative Executi…
Despite numerous countermeasures proposed by practitioners and researchers, remote control-flow alteration of programs with memory-safety vulnerabilities continues to be a realistic threat. Guaranteeing that complex software is completely…
Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) have emerged at the forefront of edge computing to combat the lack of trust between system components. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are commonly used as edge computers but were not created…
Symbolic execution is a powerful verification tool for hardware designs, but suffers from the path explosion problem. We introduce a new approach, piecewise composition, which leverages the modular structure of hardware to transfer the work…
Self-modifying code (SMC) allows programs to alter their own instructions, optimizing performance and functionality on x86 processors. Despite its benefits, SMC introduces unique microarchitectural behaviors that can be exploited for…
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…
Authors of cryptographic software are well aware that their code should not leak secrets through its timing behavior, and, until 2018, they believed that following industry-standard constant-time coding guidelines was sufficient. However,…
Protecting intellectual property (IP) has become a serious challenge for chip designers. Most countermeasures are tailored for CMOS integration and tend to incur excessive overheads, resulting from additional circuitry or device-level…
The run-time electromagnetic (EM) emanation of microprocessors presents a side-channel that leaks the confidentiality of the applications running on them. Many recent works have demonstrated successful attacks leveraging such side-channels…
In large-scale networks, communication links between nodes are easily injected with false data by adversaries. This paper proposes a novel security defense strategy from the perspective of attack detection scheduling to ensure the security…
Assertions are widely used for functional validation as well as coverage analysis for both software and hardware designs. Assertions enable runtime error detection as well as faster localization of errors. While there is a vast literature…
Microarchitectural optimizations are expected to play a crucial role in ensuring performance scalability in future technology nodes. However, recent attacks have demonstrated that microarchitectural optimizations, which were assumed to be…
Hardware Trojans are malicious modifications in digital designs that can be inserted by untrusted supply chain entities. Hardware Trojans can give rise to diverse attack vectors such as information leakage (e.g. MOLES Trojan) and…
This paper introduces Triosecuris, a formally verified defense against Spectre BTB, RSB, and PHT that combines CET-style hardware-assisted control-flow integrity with compiler-inserted speculative load hardening (SLH). Triosecuris is based…
Existing logic-locking attacks are known to successfully decrypt functionally correct key of a locked combinational circuit. It is possible to extend these attacks to real-world Silicon-based Intellectual Properties (IPs, which are…
Network controllability robustness reflects how well a networked dynamical system can maintain its controllability against destructive attacks. This paper investigates the network controllability robustness from the perspective of a…
This paper investigates an emerging cache side channel attack defense approach involving the use of hardware performance counters (HPCs). These counters monitor microarchitectural events and analyze statistical deviations to differentiate…
We use historical data to estimate the potential benefit of speculative techniques for executing Ethereum smart contracts in parallel. We replay transaction traces of sampled blocks from the Ethereum blockchain over time, using a simple…
With the ubiquity of IoT devices there is a growing demand for confidentiality and integrity of data. Solutions based on reconfigurable logic (CPLD or FPGA) have certain advantages over ASIC and MCU/SoC alternatives. Programmable logic…
Microcode is an abstraction layer used by modern x86 processors that interprets user-visible CISC instructions to hardware-internal RISC instructions. The capability to update x86 microcode enables a vendor to modify CPU behavior in-field,…
This paper studies a strategic security problem in networked control systems under stealthy false data injection attacks. The security problem is modeled as a bilateral cognitive security game between a defender and an adversary, each…