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

Mainstream compilers implement different countermeasures to prevent specific classes of speculative execution attacks. Unfortunately, these countermeasures either lack formal guarantees or come with proofs restricted to speculative…

Irregular codes are bottlenecked by memory and communication latency. Decoupled access/execute (DAE) is a common technique to tackle this problem. It relies on the compiler to separate memory address generation from the rest of the program,…

Today, security threats to operating systems largely come from network. Traditional discretionary access control mechanism alone can hardly defeat them. Although traditional mandatory access control models can effectively protect the…

Modern microarchitectures incorporate optimization techniques such as speculative loads and store forwarding to improve the memory bottleneck. The processor executes the load speculatively before the stores, and forwards the data of a…

Because FPGAs outperform traditional processing cores like CPUs and GPUs in terms of performance per watt and flexibility, they are being used more and more in cloud and data center applications. There are growing worries about the security…

Caches have been exploited to leak secret information due to the different times they take to handle memory accesses. Cache timing attacks include non-speculative cache side and covert channel attacks and cache-based speculative execution…

Modern out-of-order CPUs heavily rely on speculative execution for performance optimization, with branch prediction serving as a cornerstone to minimize stalls and maximize efficiency. Whenever shared branch prediction resources lack proper…

We propose Speculative Decoding (SpecDec), for the first time ever, to formally study exploiting the idea of speculative execution to accelerate autoregressive (AR) decoding. Speculative Decoding has two innovations: Spec-Drafter -- an…

Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant computational bottlenecks during inference due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention mechanisms, particularly as context lengths increase. We introduce SpecAttn, a novel training-free…

Temporal memory corruptions are commonly exploited software vulnerabilities that can lead to powerful attacks. Despite significant progress made by decades of research on mitigation techniques, existing countermeasures fall short due to…

At the edge of modern cyber-physical systems, Micro-Controller Units (MCUs) are responsible for safety-critical sensing/actuation. However, MCU cost constraints rule out the usual security mechanisms of general-purpose computers. Thus,…

Speculative backpropagation has emerged as a promising technique to accelerate the training of neural networks by overlapping the forward and backward passes. Leveraging speculative weight updates when error gradients fall within a specific…

The recent Meltdown and Spectre attacks highlight the importance of automated verification techniques for identifying hardware security vulnerabilities. We have developed a tool for synthesizing microarchitecture-specific programs capable…

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…

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,…

The security goals of cloud providers and users include memory confidentiality and integrity, which requires implementing Replay-Attack protection (RAP). RAP can be achieved using integrity trees or mutually authenticated channels.…

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…

Secure and trustworthy execution in heterogeneous SoCs is a major priority in the modern computing system. Security of SoCs mainly addresses two broad layers of trust issues: 1. Protection against hardware security threats(Side-channel, IP…

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 this paper, we present NetSpectre, a generic remote Spectre variant 1 attack. For this purpose, we demonstrate the first access-driven remote Evict+Reload cache attack over network, leaking 15 bits per hour. Beyond retrofitting existing…