Related papers: SafeBet: Secure, Simple, and Fast Speculative Exec…
Secure computation is of critical importance to not only the DoD, but across financial institutions, healthcare, and anywhere personally identifiable information (PII) is accessed. Traditional security techniques require data to be…
Despite extensive efforts to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values and safety rules, jailbreak attacks that exploit certain vulnerabilities continuously emerge, highlighting the need to strengthen existing LLMs with…
The Spectre speculative side-channel attacks pose formidable threats for security. Research has shown that code following the cryptographic constant-time discipline can be efficiently protected against Spectre v1 using a selective variant…
Modern computer processors use microarchitectural optimization mechanisms to improve performance. As a downside, such optimizations are prone to introducing side-channel vulnerabilities. Speculative loading of memory, called prefetching, is…
Speculative attacks are still an active threat today that, even if initially focused on the x86 platform, reach across all modern hardware architectures. RISC-V is a newly proposed open instruction set architecture that has seen traction…
Modern computer systems need to execute under strict safety constraints (e.g., a power limit), but doing so often conflicts with their ability to deliver high performance (i.e. minimal latency). Prior work uses machine learning to…
Speculative vulnerabilities such as Spectre and Meltdown expose speculative execution state that can be exploited to leak information across security domains via side-channels. Such vulnerabilities often stay undetected for a long time as…
Recently, out-of-order execution, an important performance optimization in modern high-end processors, has been revealed to pose a significant security threat, allowing information leaks across security domains. In particular, the Meltdown…
Many smartphones now deploy conventional operating systems, so the rootkit attacks so prevalent on desktop and server systems are now a threat to smartphones. While researchers have advocated using virtualization to detect and prevent…
Flaky failure triage is crucial for keeping distributed database continuous integration (CI) efficient and reliable. After a failure is observed, operators must quickly decide whether to auto-rerun the job as likely flaky or escalate it as…
Spectre vulnerabilities violate our fundamental assumptions about architectural abstractions, allowing attackers to steal sensitive data despite previously state-of-the-art countermeasures. To defend against Spectre, developers of…
The rapid adoption of Transformer-based AI has been driven by accessible models such as ChatGPT, which provide API-based services for developers and businesses. However, as these online inference services increasingly handle sensitive…
The prevalence of memory corruption bugs in the past decades resulted in numerous defenses, such as stack canaries, control flow integrity (CFI), and memory safe languages. These defenses can prevent entire classes of vulnerabilities, and…
Meltdown and Spectre exploit microarchitectural changes the CPU makes during transient out-of-order execution. Using side-channel techniques, these attacks enable leaking arbitrary data from memory. As state-of-the-art software mitigations…
Recent attacks on federated learning demonstrate that keeping the training data on clients' devices does not provide sufficient privacy, as the model parameters shared by clients can leak information about their training data. A 'secure…
To improve the overall performance of processors, computer architects use various performance optimization techniques in modern processors, such as speculative execution, branch prediction, and chaotic execution. Both now and in the future,…
Modern applications often operate on data in multiple administrative domains. In this federated setting, participants may not fully trust each other. These distributed applications use transactions as a core mechanism for ensuring…
Trusted execution environments (TEEs) provide an environment for running workloads in the cloud without having to trust cloud service providers, by offering additional hardware-assisted security guarantees. However, main memory encryption…
Gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT) is an ensemble machine learning algorithm, which is widely used in industry, due to its good performance and easy interpretation. Due to the problem of data isolation and the requirement of privacy,…
Performance-enhancing mechanisms such as branch prediction, out-of-order execution, and return stack buffer (RSB) have been widely employed in today's modern processing units. Although successful in increasing the CPU performance,…