Related papers: SafeBet: Secure, Simple, and Fast Speculative Exec…
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…
Side-channel attacks such as Spectre that utilize speculative execution to steal application secrets pose a significant threat to modern computing systems. While program transformations can mitigate some Spectre attacks, more advanced…
Speculative side-channel attacks access sensitive data and use transmitters to leak the data during wrong-path execution. Various defenses have been proposed to prevent such information leakage. However, not all speculatively executed…
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…
Recent advancements in speculative decoding have demonstrated considerable speedup across a wide array of large language model (LLM) tasks. Speculative decoding inherently relies on sacrificing extra memory allocations to generate several…
Recent research has revealed an ever-growing class of microarchitectural attacks that exploit speculative execution, a standard feature in modern processors. Proposed and deployed countermeasures involve a variety of compiler updates,…
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…
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…
Spectre intrusions exploit speculative execution design vulnerabilities in modern processors. The attacks violate the principles of isolation in programs to gain unauthorized private user information. Current state-of-the-art detection…
One of the most prevalent source of side channel vulnerabilities is the secret-dependent behavior of conditional branches (SDBCB). The state-of-the-art solution relies on Constant-Time Expressions, which require high programming effort and…
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,…
Spectre attacks exploit speculative execution to leak sensitive information. In the last few years, a number of static side-channel detectors have been proposed to detect cache leakage in the presence of speculative execution. However,…
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…
Modern microprocessors depend on speculative execution, creating vulnerabilities that enable transient execution attacks. Prior defenses target speculative data leakage but overlook false dependencies from partial address aliasing, where…
Since the advent of SPECTRE, a number of countermeasures have been proposed and deployed. Rigorously reasoning about their effectiveness, however, requires a well-defined notion of security against speculative execution attacks, which has…
The transient-execution attack Meltdown leaks sensitive information by transiently accessing inaccessible data during out-of-order execution. Although Meltdown is fixed in hardware for recent CPU generations, most currently-deployed CPUs…
Recently discovered Spectre and meltdown attacks affects almost all processors by leaking confidential information to other processes through side-channel attacks. These vulnerabilities expose design flaws in the architecture of modern…
The recent Spectre attacks have demonstrated that modern microarchitectural optimizations can make software insecure. These attacks use features like pipelining, out-of-order and speculation to extract information about the memory contents…
A recent discovery of a new class of microarchitectural attacks called Spectre picked up the attention of the security community as these attacks can circumvent many traditional mechanisms of defense. One of the attacks---Bounds Check…
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…