Related papers: PREFENDER: A Prefetching Defender against Cache Si…
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…
Modern x86 processors have many prefetch instructions that can be used by programmers to boost performance. However, these instructions may also cause security problems. In particular, we found that on Intel processors, there are two…
The IP-stride prefetcher has recently been exploited to leak secrets through side-channel attacks. It, however, cannot be simply disabled for security with prefetching speedup as a sacrifice. The state-of-the-art defense tries to retain the…
To defend against conflict-based cache side-channel attacks, cache partitioning or remapping techniques were proposed to prevent set conflicts between different security domains or obfuscate the locations of such conflicts. But such…
Recent work has shown that out-of-order and speculative execution mechanisms used to increase performance in the majority of processors expose the processors to critical attacks. These attacks, called Meltdown and Spectre, exploit the side…
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…
Hardware caches are essential performance optimization features in modern processors to reduce the effective memory access time. Unfortunately, they are also the prime targets for attacks on computer processors because they are…
Caches have become the prime method for unintended information extraction across logical isolation boundaries. Even Spectre and Meltdown rely on the cache side channel, as it provides great resolution and is widely available on all major…
Traditional side-channels take advantage of secrets being used as inputs to unsafe instructions, used for memory accesses, or used in control flow decisions. Constant-time programming, which restricts such code patterns, has been widely…
Cache randomization has recently been revived as a promising defense against conflict-based cache side-channel attacks. As two of the latest implementations, CEASER-S and ScatterCache both claim to thwart conflict-based cache side-channel…
In this paper, we reveal the existence of a new class of prefetcher, the XPT prefetcher, in the modern Intel processors which has never been officially documented. It speculatively issues a load, bypassing last-level cache (LLC) lookups,…
Recently discovered Spectre and meltdown attacks affects almost all processors by leaking confidential information to other processes through side-channel attacks. These vulnerabilities expose design flaws in the architecture of modern…
Cache prefetcher greatly eliminates compulsory cache misses, by fetching data from slower memory to faster cache before it is actually required by processors. Sophisticated prefetchers predict next use cache line by repeating program's…
This paper investigates an emerging cache side channel attack defense approach involving the use of hardware performance counters (HPCs). These counters monitor microarchitectural events and analyze statistical deviations to differentiate…
High load latency that results from deep cache hierarchies and relatively slow main memory is an important limiter of single-thread performance. Data prefetch helps reduce this latency by fetching data up the hierarchy before it is…
In cache-based side channel attacks, an attacker infers information about the victim based on the presence, or lack thereof, of one or more cachelines. Determining a cacheline's presence, which we refer to as "reading the signal", typically…
Side-channel attacks have become prominent attack surfaces in cyberspace. Attackers use the side information generated by the system while performing a task. Among the various side-channel attacks, cache side-channel attacks are leading as…
Microarchitectural side channel attacks have been very prominent in security research over the last few years. Caches have been an outstanding covert channel, as they provide high resolution and generic cross-core leakage even with simple…
Timing and cache side channels provide powerful attacks against many sensitive operations including cryptographic implementations. Existing defenses cannot protect against all classes of such attacks without incurring prohibitive…
Cache side channel attacks are a sophisticated and persistent threat that exploit vulnerabilities in modern processors to extract sensitive information. These attacks leverage weaknesses in shared computational resources, particularly the…