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This paper provides the first systematic analysis of a synergistic threat model encompassing memory corruption vulnerabilities and microarchitectural side-channel vulnerabilities. We study speculative shield bypass attacks that leverage…

Side-channel attacks pose serious threats to many security models, especially sandbox-based browsers. While transient-execution side channels in out-of-order processors have previously been blamed for vulnerabilities such as Spectre and…

Attacks like Spectre abuse speculative execution, one of the key performance optimizations of modern CPUs. Recently, several testing tools have emerged to automatically detect speculative leaks in commercial (black-box) CPUs. However, the…

Speculative execution is an optimization technique that has been part of CPUs for over a decade. It predicts the outcome and target of branch instructions to avoid stalling the execution pipeline. However, until recently, the security…

Timing side channels pose a significant threat to the security and privacy of software applications. We propose an approach for mitigating this problem by decreasing the strength of the side channels as measured by entropy-based objectives,…

Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) allow user processes to create enclaves that protect security-sensitive computation against access from the OS kernel and the hypervisor. Recent work has shown that TEEs are vulnerable to side-channel…

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…

Timing-based side or covert channels in processor caches continue to present a threat to computer systems, and they are the key to many of the recent Spectre and Meltdown attacks. Based on improvements to an existing three-step model for…

Out-of-order speculation, a technique ubiquitous since the early 1990s, remains a fundamental security flaw. Via attacks such as Spectre and Meltdown, an attacker can trick a victim, in an otherwise entirely correct program, into leaking…

Reasoning about correctness and security of software is increasingly difficult due to the complexity of modern microarchitectural features such as out-of-order execution. A class of security vulnerabilities termed Spectre that exploits side…

We present uSpectre, a new class of transient execution attacks that exploit microcode branch mispredictions to transiently leak sensitive data. We find that many long-known and recently-discovered transient execution attacks, which were…

Multi-process concurrency is effective in improving program efficiency and maximizing CPU utilization. The correct execution of concurrency is ensured by the mutual exclusion and synchronization mechanism (MESM) that manages the shared…

Timing side channels have been used to extract cryptographic keys and sensitive documents, even from trusted enclaves. In this paper, we focus on cache side channels created by access to shared code or data in the memory hierarchy. This…

Numerous studies have underscored the significant privacy risks associated with various leakage patterns in encrypted data stores. While many solutions have been proposed to mitigate these leakages, they either (1) incur substantial…

MLaaS (Machine Learning as a Service) has become popular in the cloud computing domain, allowing users to leverage cloud resources for running private inference of ML models on their data. However, ensuring user input privacy and secure…

Timing and cache side channels provide powerful attacks against many sensitive operations including cryptographic implementations. Existing defenses cannot protect against all classes of such attacks without incurring prohibitive…

Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) are used to safeguard on-device models. However, directly employing TEEs to secure the entire DNN model is challenging due to the limited computational speed. Utilizing GPU can accelerate DNN's…

Existing speculative execution attacks are limited to breaching confidentiality of data beyond privilege boundary, the so-called spectre-type attacks. All of them utilize the changes in microarchitectural buffers made by the speculative…

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,…

Since the advent of Spectre attacks, researchers and practitioners have developed a range of hardware and software measures to counter transient execution attacks. A prime example of such mitigation is speculative load hardening in LLVM,…