Related papers: Mitigating Speculation-based Attacks through Confi…
The disclosure of the Spectre speculative-execution attacks in January 2018 has left a severe vulnerability that systems are still struggling with how to patch. The solutions that currently exist tend to have incomplete coverage, perform…
We propose ProSpeCT, a generic formal processor model providing provably secure speculation for the constant-time policy. For constant-time programs under a non-speculative semantics, ProSpeCT guarantees that speculative and out-of-order…
Secure speculation schemes have shown great promise in the war against speculative side-channel attacks, and will be a key building block for developing secure, high-performance architectures moving forward. As the field matures, the need…
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,…
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,…
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…
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,…
CPU cache is a limited but crucial storage component in modern processors, whereas the cache timing side-channel may inadvertently leak information through the physically measurable timing variance. Speculative execution, an essential…
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.…
In recent years, several hardware-based countermeasures proposed to mitigate Spectre attacks have been shown to be insecure. To enable the development of effective secure speculation countermeasures, we need easy-to-use tools that can…
Spectre and Meltdown attacks and their variants exploit hardware performance optimization features to cause security breaches. Secret information is accessed and leaked through covert or side channels. New attack variants keep appearing and…
Recently, speculative decoding (SD) has emerged as a promising technique to accelerate LLM inference by employing a small draft model to propose draft tokens in advance, and validating them in parallel with the large target model. However,…
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,…
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…
Spectre, Meltdown, and related attacks have demonstrated that kernels, hypervisors, trusted execution environments, and browsers are prone to information disclosure through micro-architectural weaknesses. However, it remains unclear as to…
SPEculative Execution side Channel Hardware (SPEECH) Vulnerabilities have enabled the notorious Meltdown, Spectre, and L1 terminal fault (L1TF) attacks. While a number of studies have reported different variants of SPEECH vulnerabilities,…
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.…
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"…
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…