Related papers: Specification and Verification of Side-channel Sec…
Leakage contracts have been proposed as a new security abstraction at the instruction set architecture level. Leakage contracts aim to capture the information that processors may leak via microarchitectural side channels. Recently, the…
Microarchitectural attacks compromise security by exploiting software-visible artifacts of microarchitectural optimizations such as caches and speculative execution. Defending against such attacks at the software level requires an…
Hardware-software contracts are abstract specifications of a CPU's leakage behavior. They enable verifying the security of high-level programs against side-channel attacks without having to explicitly reason about the microarchitectural…
Low-trust architectures work on, from the viewpoint of software, always-encrypted data, and significantly reduce the amount of hardware trust to a small software-free enclave component. In this paper, we perform a complete formal…
Hardware-software leakage contracts have emerged as a formalism for specifying side-channel security guarantees of modern processors, yet verifying that a complex hardware design complies with its contract remains a major challenge. While…
There is a growing need for hardware-software contracts which precisely define the implications of microarchitecture on software security-i.e., security contracts. It is our view that such contracts should explicitly account for…
Hardware (HW) security issues have been emerging at an alarming rate in recent years. Transient execution attacks, in particular, pose a genuine threat to the security of modern computing systems. Despite recent advances, understanding the…
Cache side-channel attacks extract secrets by examining how victim software accesses cache. To date, practical attacks on cryptosystems and media libraries are demonstrated under different scenarios, inferring secret keys and reconstructing…
The code generation modules inside modern compilers such as GCC and LLVM, which use a limited number of CPU registers to store a large number of program variables, may introduce side-channel leaks even in software equipped with…
This work presents a new tool to verify the correctness of cryptographic implementations with respect to cache attacks. Our methodology discovers vulnerabilities that are hard to find with other techniques, observed as exploitable leakage.…
Side-channel attacks that leak sensitive information through a computing device's interaction with its physical environment have proven to be a severe threat to devices' security, particularly when adversaries have unfettered physical…
While side-channel leakage is traditionally evaluated from a fabricated chip, it is more time-efficient and cost-effective to do so during the design phase of the chip. We present a methodology to rank the gates of a design according to…
Leakage of confidential information represents a serious security risk. Despite a number of novel, theoretical advances, it has been unclear if and how quantitative approaches to measuring leakage of confidential information could be…
Security in modern RISC-V processors demands more than functional correctness: It requires resilience to side-channel attacks. This paper evaluates the vulnerability of the side channel of the CVA6 RISC-V core by analyzing software-based…
Modern out-of-order processors face speculative execution attacks. Despite various proposed software and hardware mitigations to prevent such attacks, new attacks keep arising from unknown vulnerabilities. Thus, a formal and rigorous…
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…
This paper evaluates new security threats due to the processor frontend in modern Intel processors. The root causes of the security threats are the multiple paths in the processor frontend that the micro-operations can take: through the…
Power side-channel attacks (SCAs) have become a major concern to the security community due to their non-invasive feature, low-cost, and effectiveness in extracting secret information from hardware implementation of cryto algorithms.…
CPUs provide isolation mechanisms like virtualization and privilege levels to protect software. Yet these focus on architectural isolation while typically overlooking microarchitectural side channels, exemplified by Meltdown and Foreshadow.…
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…