Related papers: Mitigating Speculation-based Attacks through Confi…

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…

Real-time and cyber-physical systems need to interact with and respond to their physical environment in a predictable time. While multicore platforms provide incredible computational power and throughput, they also introduce new sources of…

In recent years, there have emerged many new hardware mechanisms for improving the security of our computer systems. Hardware offers many advantages over pure software approaches: immutability of mechanisms to software attacks, better…

Whenever modern CPUs encounter a conditional branch for which the condition cannot be evaluated yet, they predict the likely branch target and speculatively execute code. Such pipelining is key to optimizing runtime performance and is…

New hardware primitives such as Intel SGX secure a user-level process in presence of an untrusted or compromised OS. Such "enclaved execution" systems are vulnerable to several side-channels, one of which is the page fault channel. In this…

The transformation of power grids into intelligent cyber-physical systems brings numerous benefits, but also significantly increases the surface for cyber-attacks, demanding appropriate countermeasures. However, the development, validation,…

In this paper, we take a deep dive into microarchitectural security from a hardware designer's perspective by reviewing the existing approaches to detect hardware vulnerabilities during the design phase. We show that a protection gap…

Embedded devices are increasingly present in our everyday life. They often process critical information, and hence, rely on cryptographic protocols to achieve security. However, embedded devices remain vulnerable to attackers seeking to…

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models enable sparse expert activation, meaning that only a subset of the model's parameters is used during each inference. However, to translate this sparsity into practical performance, an expert caching mechanism…

Attacks based on side-channel analysis (SCA) pose a severe security threat to modern computing platforms, further exacerbated on IoT devices by their pervasiveness and handling of private and critical data. Designing SCA-resistant computing…

The practical applications based on recurrent spiking neurons are limited due to their non-trivial learning algorithms. The temporal nature of spiking neurons is more favorable for hardware implementation where signals can be represented in…

Secure by Design has become the mainstream development approach ensuring that software systems are not vulnerable to cyberattacks. Architectural security controls need to be carefully monitored over the software development life cycle to…

Out-of-order execution and speculative execution are among the biggest contributors to performance and efficiency of modern processors. However, they are inconsiderate, leaking secret data during the transient execution of instructions.…

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by utilizing otherwise idle computational resources during memory-to-chip data transfer. Current speculative decoding methods typically assume a considerable amount of available computing…

The Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture has emerged as a promising approach to mitigate the rising computational costs of large language models (LLMs) by selectively activating parameters. However, its high memory requirements and…

Computer systems often provide hardware support for isolation mechanisms like privilege levels, virtual memory, or enclaved execution. Over the past years, several successful software-based side-channel attacks have been developed that…

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…

Unsafe memory accesses in programs written using popular programming languages like C/C++ have been among the leading causes for software vulnerability. Prior memory safety checkers such as SoftBound enforce memory spatial safety by…

We present a kernel-level infrastructure that allows system-wide detection of malicious applications attempting to exploit cache-based side-channel attacks to break the process confinement enforced by standard operating systems. This…

This paper argues and shows that speculative vectorization, where a loop with rare or unknown memory dependencies are still vectorized, is fundamentally vulnerable and cannot be mitigated by existing defenses. We implement a simple proof of…