Related papers: Mitigating Speculation-based Attacks through Confi…

CPUs provide isolation mechanisms like virtualization and privilege levels to protect software. Yet these focus on architectural isolation while typically overlooking microarchitectural side channels, exemplified by Meltdown and Foreshadow.…

There are increasing concerns about possible malicious modifications of integrated circuits (ICs) used in critical applications. Such attacks are often referred to as hardware Trojans. While many techniques focus on hardware Trojan…

In the last decade, a lot of effort has been put into securing software application during development in the software industry. Software security is a research field in this area which looks at how security can be weaved into software at…

Existing speculative execution attacks are limited to breaching confidentiality of data beyond privilege boundary, the so-called spectre-type attacks. All of them utilize the changes in microarchitectural buffers made by the speculative…

As large language models gain widespread adoption, running them efficiently becomes crucial. Recent works on LLM inference use speculative decoding to achieve extreme speedups. However, most of these works implicitly design their algorithms…

With the improvements in computing technologies, edge devices in the Internet-of-Things have become more complex. The enabler technology for these complex systems are powerful application core processors with operating system support, such…

With the ubiquity of IoT devices there is a growing demand for confidentiality and integrity of data. Solutions based on reconfigurable logic (CPLD or FPGA) have certain advantages over ASIC and MCU/SoC alternatives. Programmable logic…

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…

Cyber-physical systems are prone to sensor attacks that can compromise safety. A common approach to synthesizing controllers robust to sensor attacks is secure state reconstruction (SSR) -- but this is computationally expensive, hindering…

This paper presents SgxPectre Attacks that exploit the recently disclosed CPU bugs to subvert the confidentiality and integrity of SGX enclaves. Particularly, we show that when branch prediction of the enclave code can be influenced by…

Specification mining offers a solution by automating security specification for hardware. Specification miners use a form of machine learning to specify behaviors of a system by studying a system in execution. However, specification mining…

In this paper, we analyze the security of programming languages and their execution environments (compilers and interpreters) with respect to Spectre attacks. The analysis shows that only 16 out of 42 execution environments have mitigations…

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…

We describe Swivel, a new compiler framework for hardening WebAssembly (Wasm) against Spectre attacks. Outside the browser, Wasm has become a popular lightweight, in-process sandbox and is, for example, used in production to isolate…

Fine-tuning large language models often undermines their safety alignment, a problem further amplified by harmful fine-tuning attacks in which adversarial data removes safeguards and induces unsafe behaviors. We propose SPARD, a defense…

Many recent papers have proposed novel electrical measurements or physical inspection technologies for defending printed circuit boards (PCBs) and printed circuit board assemblies (PCBAs) against tampering. As motivation, these papers…

Previous schemes for designing secure branch prediction unit (SBPU) based on physical isolation can only offer limited security and significantly affect BPU's prediction capability, leading to prominent performance degradation. Moreover,…

Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) is a promising hardware-based technology for protecting sensitive computations from potentially compromised system software. However, recent research has shown that SGX is vulnerable to branch-shadowing…

Memory corruption vulnerabilities often enable attackers to take control of a target system by overwriting control-flow relevant data (such as return addresses and function pointers), which are potentially stored in close proximity of…

Obfuscation is a technique for protecting hardware intellectual property (IP) blocks against reverse engineering, piracy, and malicious modifications. Current obfuscation efforts mainly focus on functional locking of a design to prevent…