Related papers: ProSpeCT: Provably Secure Speculation for the Cons…
Analyzing the behavior of a program running on a processor that supports speculative execution is crucial for applications such as execution time estimation and side channel detection. Unfortunately, existing static analysis techniques…
Self-stabilization ensures that, after any transient fault, the system recovers in a finite time and eventually exhibits. Speculation consists in guaranteeing that the system satisfies its requirements for any execution but exhibits…
The disclosure of the Spectre speculative-execution attacks in January 2018 has left a severe vulnerability that systems are still struggling with how to patch. The solutions that currently exist tend to have incomplete coverage, perform…
Speculative vulnerabilities such as Spectre and Meltdown expose speculative execution state that can be exploited to leak information across security domains via side-channels. Such vulnerabilities often stay undetected for a long time as…
This paper proposes RCP, a new reversible coherence protocol that ensures invisible speculative load execution (ISLE) with low overhead. RCP can be combined with processor mechanisms that eliminate the effects of speculative instructions on…
Security vulnerability analysis of Integrated Circuits using conventional design-time validation and verification techniques (like simulations, emulations, etc.) is generally a computationally intensive task and incomplete by nature,…
Speculative attacks are still an active threat today that, even if initially focused on the x86 platform, reach across all modern hardware architectures. RISC-V is a newly proposed open instruction set architecture that has seen traction…
Speculative execution is crucial in enhancing modern processor performance but can introduce Spectre-type vulnerabilities that may leak sensitive information. Detecting Spectre gadgets from programs has been a research focus to enhance the…
The Spectre family of speculative execution attacks have required a rethinking of formal methods for security. Approaches based on operational speculative semantics have made initial inroads towards finding vulnerable code and validating…
Spectre attacks and their many subsequent variants are a new vulnerability class affecting modern CPUs. The attacks rely on the ability to misguide speculative execution, generally by exploiting the branch prediction structures, to execute…
The recent discovery of the Spectre and Meltdown attacks represents a watershed moment not just for the field of Computer Security, but also of Programming Languages. This paper explores speculative side-channel attacks and their…
Computer systems often provide hardware support for isolation mechanisms like privilege levels, virtual memory, or enclaved execution. Over the past years, several successful software-based side-channel attacks have been developed that…
Hardware caches are essential performance optimization features in modern processors to reduce the effective memory access time. Unfortunately, they are also the prime targets for attacks on computer processors because they are…
Transient execution attacks, also called speculative execution attacks, have drawn much interest as they exploit the transient execution of instructions, e.g., during branch prediction, to leak data. Transient execution is fundamental to…
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…
Hyperproperties have shown to be a powerful tool for expressing and reasoning about information-flow security policies. In this paper, we investigate the problem of statistical model checking (SMC) for hyperproperties. Unlike exhaustive…
We present CureSpec, the first model-checking based framework for automatic repair of programs with respect to information leaks in the presence of side-channels and speculative execution. CureSpec is based on formal models of attacker…
Embedded devices are increasingly ubiquitous and vital, often supporting safety-critical functions. However, due to strict cost and energy constraints, they are typically implemented with Micro-Controller Units (MCUs) that lack advanced…
Just-in-time compilation provides significant performance improvements for programs written in dynamic languages. These benefits come from the ability of the compiler to speculate about likely cases and generate optimized code for these.…
Recent work has shown that out-of-order and speculative execution mechanisms used to increase performance in the majority of processors expose the processors to critical attacks. These attacks, called Meltdown and Spectre, exploit the side…