Related papers: Mitigating Speculation-based Attacks through Confi…

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…

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…

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…

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 advancements in Mixture of Experts (MoE) models have significantly increased their parameter scale as well as model performance. Extensive offloading techniques have been proposed to address the GPU memory limitations of MoE…

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…

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,…

High-confidence computing relies on trusted instructional set architecture, sealed kernels, and secure operating systems. Cloud computing depends on trusted systems for virtualization tasks. Branch predictions and pipelines are essential in…

Large language models increasingly use external tools such as web search and document retrieval to solve information-intensive tasks. However, multi-hop tool use in complex tasks introduces substantial latency, since the model must…

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…

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…

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 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…

Major chip manufacturers have all introduced Multithreaded processors. These processors are used for running a variety of workloads. Efficient resource utilization is an important design aspect in such processors. Depending on the workload,…

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…

With the exponential rise in the use of cloud services, smart devices, and IoT devices, advanced cyber attacks have become increasingly sophisticated and ubiquitous. Furthermore, the rapid evolution of computing architectures and memory…

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…

Users are demanding increased data security. As a result, security is rapidly becoming a first-order design constraint in next generation computing systems. Researchers and practitioners are exploring various security technologies to meet…

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…

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,…