Related papers: ProSpeCT: Provably Secure Speculation for the Cons…

Formal verification of software and compilers has been used to rule out large classes of security-critical issues, but risk of unintentional information leakage has received much less consideration. It is a key requirement for formal…

Continuous prompts, or "soft prompts", are a widely-adopted parameter-efficient tuning strategy for large language models, but are often less favorable due to their opaque nature. Prior attempts to interpret continuous prompts relied on…

Constant-time (CT) verification tools are commonly used for detecting potential side-channel vulnerabilities in cryptographic libraries. Recently, a new class of tools, called speculative constant-time (SCT) tools, has also been used for…

In many real-world problems, predictions are leveraged to monitor and control cyber-physical systems, demanding guarantees on the satisfaction of reliability and safety requirements. However, predictions are inherently uncertain, and…

Practical attacks that exploit speculative execution can leak confidential information via microarchitectural side channels. The recently-demonstrated Spectre attacks leverage speculative loads which circumvent access checks to read…

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,…

Whenever modern CPUs encounter a conditional branch for which the condition cannot be evaluated yet, they predict the likely branch target and speculatively execute code. Such pipelining is key to optimizing runtime performance and is…

Chain-of-Thought reasoning significantly improves the performance of large language models on complex tasks, but incurs high inference latency due to long generation traces. Step-level speculative reasoning aims to mitigate this cost, yet…

We propose a new formal criterion for secure compilation, providing strong security guarantees for components written in unsafe, low-level languages with C-style undefined behavior. Our criterion goes beyond recent proposals, which protect…

The importance of preventing microarchitectural timing side channels in security-critical applications has surged in recent years. Constant-time programming has emerged as a best-practice technique for preventing the leakage of secret…

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…

Environmental noise (e.g.heat, ionized particles, etc.) causes transient faults in hardware, which lead to corruption of stored values. Mission-critical devices require such faults to be mitigated by fault-tolerance --- a combination of…

RISC-V is gaining popularity for its adaptability and cost-effectiveness in processor design. With the increasing adoption of RISC-V, the importance of implementing robust security verification has grown significantly. In the state of the…

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are vulnerable to attacks targeting outgoing actuation commands that modify their physical behaviors. The limited resources in such systems, coupled with their stringent timing constraints, often prevents the…

We address the problem of preserving non-interference across compiler transformations under speculative semantics. We develop a proof method that ensures the preservation uniformly across all source programs. The basis of our proof method…

Authors of cryptographic software are well aware that their code should not leak secrets through its timing behavior, and, until 2018, they believed that following industry-standard constant-time coding guidelines was sufficient. However,…

The integration of large language models (LLMs) into a wide range of applications has highlighted the critical role of well-crafted system prompts, which require extensive testing and domain expertise. These prompts enhance task performance…

Rigorous quantitative evaluation of microarchitectural side channels is challenging for two reasons. First, the processors, attacks, and defenses often exhibit probabilistic behaviors. These probabilistic behaviors arise due to natural…

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…

Instrumenting programs for performing run-time checking of properties, such as regular shapes, is a common and useful technique that helps programmers detect incorrect program behaviors. This is specially true in dynamic languages such as…