Related papers: Clueless: A Tool Characterising Values Leaking as …

We present a new hardware-agnostic side-channel attack that targets one of the most fundamental software caches in modern computer systems: the operating system page cache. The page cache is a pure software cache that contains all…

Directory-based protocols have been the de facto solution for maintaining cache coherence in shared-memory parallel systems comprising multi/many cores, where each store instruction is eagerly made globally visible by invalidating the…

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…

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…

Increasing numbers of software vulnerabilities are discovered every year whether they are reported publicly or discovered internally in proprietary code. These vulnerabilities can pose serious risk of exploit and result in system…

Existing power analysis techniques rely on strong adversary models with prior knowledge of the leakage or training data. We introduce side-channel analysis with unsupervised learning (SCAUL) that can recover the secret key without requiring…

This paper presents new methods and results for recognising black-box program functions using hardware performance counters (HPC), where an investigator can invoke and measure function calls. Important use cases include analysing compiled…

Microarchitectural side channels expose unprotected software to information leakage attacks where a software adversary is able to track runtime behavior of a benign process and steal secrets such as cryptographic keys. As suggested by…

Serverless computing is an emerging cloud paradigm with serverless functions at its core. While serverless environments enable software developers to focus on developing applications without the need to actively manage the underlying…

We present a kernel-level infrastructure that allows system-wide detection of malicious applications attempting to exploit cache-based side-channel attacks to break the process confinement enforced by standard operating systems. This…

We demonstrate that the format in which private keys are persisted impacts Side Channel Analysis (SCA) security. Surveying several widely deployed software libraries, we investigate the formats they support, how they parse these keys, and…

Although cryptographic algorithms may be mathematically secure, it is often possible to leak secret information from the implementation of the algorithms. Timing and power side-channel vulnerabilities are some of the most widely considered…

One of the most significant challenges in the field of software code auditing is the presence of vulnerabilities in software source code. Every year, more and more software flaws are discovered, either internally in proprietary code or…

Despite its ever-increasing impact, security is not considered as a design objective in commercial electronic design automation (EDA) tools. This results in vulnerabilities being overlooked during the software-hardware design process.…

The complexity of modern processor architectures has given rise to sophisticated interactions among their components. Such interactions may result in potential attack vectors in terms of side channels, possibly available to user-land…

Side channel attacks have emerged as a serious threat to the security of both networked and embedded systems -- in particular through the implementations of cryptographic operations. Side channels can be difficult to model formally, but…

Data-driven software engineering processes, such as vulnerability prediction heavily rely on the quality of the data used. In this paper, we observe that it is infeasible to obtain a noise-free security defect dataset in practice. Despite…

CPU cache is a limited but crucial storage component in modern processors, whereas the cache timing side-channel may inadvertently leak information through the physically measurable timing variance. Speculative execution, an essential…

Speculative execution techniques have been a cornerstone of modern processors to improve instruction-level parallelism. However, recent studies showed that this kind of techniques could be exploited by attackers to leak secret data via…

Software vulnerabilities are a serious and crucial concern. Typically, in a program or function consisting of hundreds or thousands of source code statements, there are only a few statements causing the corresponding vulnerabilities. Most…