Related papers: SafeBet: Secure, Simple, and Fast Speculative Exec…

Research on transient execution attacks including Spectre and Meltdown showed that exception or branch misprediction events might leave secret-dependent traces in the CPU's microarchitectural state. This observation led to a proliferation…

Since the discovery of Spectre, a large number of hardware mechanisms for secure speculation has been proposed. Intuitively, more defensive mechanisms are less efficient but can securely execute a larger class of programs, while more…

While it is compelling to process large streams of IoT data on the cloud edge, doing so exposes the data to a sophisticated, vulnerable software stack on the edge and hence security threats. To this end, we advocate isolating the data and…

Spectre attacks enable an attacker to access restricted data in an application's memory. Both the academic community and industry veterans have developed several mitigations to block Spectre attacks, but to date, very few have been formally…

ARM Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) is a new hardware feature introduced in ARMv8.5-A architecture, aiming to detect memory corruption vulnerabilities. The low overhead of MTE makes it an attractive solution to mitigate memory corruption…

Trusted execution environments (TEEs) are an integral part of modern secure processors. They ensure that their application and code pages are confidential, tamper proof and immune to diverse types of attacks. In 2021, Intel suddenly…

Neural code models have been increasingly incorporated into software development processes. However, their susceptibility to backdoor attacks presents a significant security risk. The state-of-the-art understanding focuses on…

As large language models gain widespread adoption, running them efficiently becomes crucial. Recent works on LLM inference use speculative decoding to achieve extreme speedups. However, most of these works implicitly design their algorithms…

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…

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model inference by allowing a lightweight draft model to propose outputs that a stronger target model verifies. However, its token-centric nature allows erroneous steps to propagate.…

We introduce CheckNet, a method for secure inference with deep neural networks on untrusted devices. CheckNet is like a checksum for neural network inference: it verifies the integrity of the inference computation performed by untrusted…

Browsers, Library OSes, and system emulators rely on sandboxes and in-process isolation to emulate system resources and securely isolate untrusted components. All access to system resources like system calls (syscall) need to be securely…

Transient execution side-channel attacks, such as Spectre, have been shown to break almost all isolation primitives. We introduce a new security property we call relaxed microarchitectural isolation (RMI) that allows sensitive programs that…

We present uSpectre, a new class of transient execution attacks that exploit microcode branch mispredictions to transiently leak sensitive data. We find that many long-known and recently-discovered transient execution attacks, which were…

We propose SANSCrypt, a novel sequential logic encryption scheme to protect integrated circuits against reverse engineering. Previous sequential encryption methods focus on modifying the circuit state machine such that the correct…

Speculative execution attacks undermine the security of constant-time programming, the standard technique used to prevent microarchitectural side channels in security-sensitive software such as cryptographic code. Constant-time code must…

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…

Modern processors have suffered a deluge of threats exploiting branch instruction collisions inside the branch prediction unit (BPU), from eavesdropping on secret-related branch operations to triggering malicious speculative executions.…

This paper provides the first systematic analysis of a synergistic threat model encompassing memory corruption vulnerabilities and microarchitectural side-channel vulnerabilities. We study speculative shield bypass attacks that leverage…

Recent discovery of security attacks in advanced processors, known as Spectre and Meltdown, has resulted in high public alertness about security of hardware. The root cause of these attacks is information leakage across "covert channels"…