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Attacks on the microarchitecture of modern processors have become a practical threat to security and privacy in desktop and cloud computing. Recently, cache attacks have successfully been demonstrated on ARM based mobile devices, suggesting…
Microcontroller units (MCUs) are widely used in embedded devices due to their low power consumption and cost-effectiveness. MCU firmware controls these devices and is vital to the security of embedded systems. However, performing dynamic…
The various benefits of multi-tenanting, such as higher device utilization and increased profit margin, intrigue the cloud field-programmable gate array (FPGA) servers to include multi-tenanting in their infrastructure. However, this…
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.…
Hardware crosstalk in multi-tenant superconducting quantum computers constitutes a significant security threat, enabling adversaries to inject targeted errors across tenant boundaries. We present the first end-to-end framework for mapping…
Internet of Things (IoT) devices have been increasingly integrated into our daily life. However, such smart devices suffer a broad attack surface. Particularly, attacks targeting the device software at runtime are challenging to defend…
In this paper, we take a deep dive into microarchitectural security from a hardware designer's perspective by reviewing the existing approaches to detect hardware vulnerabilities during the design phase. We show that a protection gap…
Hardware crosstalk in multi-tenant superconducting quantum computers poses a severe security threat, allowing adversaries to induce targeted errors across tenant boundaries by injecting carefully engineered pulses. We present a…
In early 2018, Meltdown first showed how to read arbitrary kernel memory from user space by exploiting side-effects from transient instructions. While this attack has been mitigated through stronger isolation boundaries between user and…
As power consumption from AI training and inference continues to increase, AI accelerators are being integrated directly into the CPU. Intel's Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) is one such example, debuting on the 4th generation Intel Xeon…
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,…
Power side-channel attacks are a very effective cryptanalysis technique that can infer secret keys of security ICs by monitoring the power consumption. Since the emergence of practical attacks in the late 90s, they have been a major threat…
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.…
As Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) become increasingly pervasive and autonomous, ensuring the resilience of their embedded logic is critical to maintaining safety and integrity. Among the most stealthy and damaging threats are non-invasive…
Embedded controllers, sensors, actuators, advanced metering infrastructure, etc. are cornerstone components of cyber-physical energy systems such as microgrids (MGs). Harnessing their monitoring and control functionalities, sophisticated…
Memory-safety violations are a prevalent cause of both reliability and security vulnerabilities in systems software written in unsafe languages like C/C++. Unfortunately, all the existing software-based solutions to this problem exhibit…
Modern computing systems are limited in performance by the memory bandwidth available to processors, a problem known as the memory wall. Processing-in-Memory (PIM) promises to substantially improve this problem by moving processing closer…
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…
Previous schemes for designing secure branch prediction unit (SBPU) based on physical isolation can only offer limited security and significantly affect BPU's prediction capability, leading to prominent performance degradation. Moreover,…
In the last two decades, the evolving cyber-threat landscape has brought to center stage the contentious tradeoffs between the security and performance of modern microprocessors. The guarantees provided by the hardware to ensure no…