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The transient execution attack is a type of attack leveraging the vulnerability of modern CPU optimization technologies. New attacks surface rapidly. The side-channel is a key part of transient execution attacks to leak data. In this work,…
Timing side channels have been used to extract cryptographic keys and sensitive documents, even from trusted enclaves. In this paper, we focus on cache side channels created by access to shared code or data in the memory hierarchy. This…
Transient Execution Attacks (TEAs) have gradually become a major security threat to modern high-performance processors. They exploit the vulnerability of speculative execution to illegally access private data, and transmit them through…
Speculative execution which is used pervasively in modern CPUs can leave side effects in the processor caches and other structures even when the speculated instructions do not commit and their direct effect is not visible. The recent…
Side-channel attacks on memory (SCAM) exploit unintended data leaks from memory subsystems to infer sensitive information, posing significant threats to system security. These attacks exploit vulnerabilities in memory access patterns, cache…
Since 2016, multiple microarchitectural attacks have exploited an effect that is attributed to prefetching. These works observe that certain user-space operations can fetch kernel addresses into the cache. Fetching user-inaccessible data…
Transient execution attacks that exploit speculation have raised significant concerns in computer systems. Typically, branch predictors are leveraged to trigger mis-speculation in transient execution attacks. In this work, we demonstrate a…
Over the last two decades, the danger of sharing resources between programs has been repeatedly highlighted. Multiple side-channel attacks, which seek to exploit shared components for leaking information, have been devised, mostly targeting…
We present a software approach to mitigate access-driven side-channel attacks that leverage last-level caches (LLCs) shared across cores to leak information between security domains (e.g., tenants in a cloud). Our approach dynamically…
Recent studies highlighting the vulnerability of computer architecture to information leakage attacks have been a cause of significant concern. Among the various classes of microarchitectural attacks, cache timing channels are especially…
In the last two decades, the evolving cyber-threat landscape has brought to center stage the contentious tradeoffs between the security and performance of modern microprocessors. The guarantees provided by the hardware to ensure no…
Side-channel attacks on microprocessors, like the RISC-V, exhibit security vulnerabilities that lead to several design challenges. Hence, it is imperative to study and analyze these security vulnerabilities comprehensively. In this paper,…
Speculative execution techniques have been a cornerstone of modern processors to improve instruction-level parallelism. However, recent studies showed that this kind of techniques could be exploited by attackers to leak secret data via…
The recent discovery of the Spectre and Meltdown attacks represents a watershed moment not just for the field of Computer Security, but also of Programming Languages. This paper explores speculative side-channel attacks and their…
Accelerators used for machine learning (ML) inference provide great performance benefits over CPUs. Securing confidential model in inference against off-chip side-channel attacks is critical in harnessing the performance advantage in…
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…
The wide deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) has given rise to strong demands for optimizing their inference performance. Today's techniques serving this purpose primarily focus on reducing latency and improving throughput through…
We present a new hardware-agnostic side-channel attack that targets one of the most fundamental software caches in modern computer systems: the operating system page cache. The page cache is a pure software cache that contains all…
The transient-execution attack Meltdown leaks sensitive information by transiently accessing inaccessible data during out-of-order execution. Although Meltdown is fixed in hardware for recent CPU generations, most currently-deployed CPUs…
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…