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The recent Spectre attacks exploit speculative execution, a pervasively used feature of modern microprocessors, to allow the exfiltration of sensitive data across protection boundaries. In this paper, we introduce a new Spectre-class attack…
The deterministic (timing) behavior of real-time systems (RTS) can be used by adversaries - say, to launch side channel attacks or even destabilize the system by denying access to critical resources. We propose a protocol (named REORDER) to…
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…
In real-time embedded systems (RTS), failures due to security breaches can cause serious damage to the system, the environment and/or injury to humans. Therefore, it is very important to understand the potential threats and attacks against…
Hardware-enclaves that target complex CPU designs compromise both security and performance. Programs have little control over micro-architecture, which leads to side-channel leaks, and then have to be transformed to have worst-case control-…
Recent attacks have broken process isolation by exploiting microarchitectural side channels that allow indirect access to shared microarchitectural state. Enclaves strengthen the process abstraction to restore isolation guarantees. We…
To improve the overall performance of processors, computer architects use various performance optimization techniques in modern processors, such as speculative execution, branch prediction, and chaotic execution. Both now and in the future,…
Spectre, Meltdown, and related attacks have demonstrated that kernels, hypervisors, trusted execution environments, and browsers are prone to information disclosure through micro-architectural weaknesses. However, it remains unclear as to…
Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) have been proposed as a solution to protect code confidentiality in scenarios where computation is outsourced to an untrusted operator. We study the resilience of such solutions to side-channel attacks…
Modern language models have enabled the development of agentic systems that achieve strong performance on reasoning-intensive tasks. Unfortunately, this has come with a security cost; these systems are vulnerable to prompt injection, a…
Transient execution attacks have been one of the widely explored microarchitectural side channels since the discovery of Spectre and Meltdown. However, much of the research has been driven by manual discovery of new transient paths through…
Side channel attacks steal secret keys by cleverly leveraging information leakages and can, therefore, break encryption. Thus, detection and mitigation of side channel attacks is a very important problem, but the solutions proposed in the…
Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant computational bottlenecks during inference due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention mechanisms, particularly as context lengths increase. We introduce SpecAttn, a novel training-free…
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…
Covert channels can be utilized to secretly deliver information from high privileged processes to low privileged processes in the context of a high-assurance computing system. In this case study, we investigate the possibility of covert…
We propose using reinforcement learning to address the challenges of discovering microarchitectural vulnerabilities, such as Spectre and Meltdown, which exploit subtle interactions in modern processors. Traditional methods like random…
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…
Today, security threats to operating systems largely come from network. Traditional discretionary access control mechanism alone can hardly defeat them. Although traditional mandatory access control models can effectively protect the…
Per Row Activation Counting (PRAC) has emerged as a robust framework for mitigating RowHammer (RH) vulnerabilities in modern DRAM systems. However, we uncover a critical vulnerability: a timing channel introduced by the Alert Back-Off (ABO)…
Recently, the new ciphertext side channels resulting from the deterministic memory encryption in Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), enable ciphertexts to manifest identifiable patterns when being sequentially written to the same memory…