Related papers: This is How You Lose the Transient Execution War

Signature-based malware detectors have proven to be insufficient as even a small change in malignant executable code can bypass these signature-based detectors. Many machine learning-based models have been proposed to efficiently detect a…

Over the past few years, several research groups have introduced innovative hardware designs for Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), aiming to secure applications against potentially compromised privileged software, including the kernel.…

Machine learning for malware classification shows encouraging results, but real deployments suffer from performance degradation as malware authors adapt their techniques to evade detection. This phenomenon, known as concept drift, occurs as…

Injection of transient faults as a way to attack cryptographic implementations has been largely studied in the last decade. Several attacks that use electromagnetic fault injection against hardware or software architectures have already…

We present Janus, a compiler-based security framework that mitigates transient execution attacks like Spectre and control-flow hijacking on ARM64 platforms. Janus integrates speculative execution and control flow dependencies with PA…

Attacks like Spectre abuse speculative execution, one of the key performance optimizations of modern CPUs. Recently, several testing tools have emerged to automatically detect speculative leaks in commercial (black-box) CPUs. However, the…

Modern out-of-order processors face speculative execution attacks. Despite various proposed software and hardware mitigations to prevent such attacks, new attacks keep arising from unknown vulnerabilities. Thus, a formal and rigorous…

To improve the overall performance of processors, computer architects use various performance optimization techniques in modern processors, such as speculative execution, branch prediction, and chaotic execution. Both now and in the future,…

Fault attacks against embedded circuits enabled to define many new attack paths against secure circuits. Every attack path relies on a specific fault model which defines the type of faults that the attacker can perform. On embedded…

Cache side channel attacks are increasingly alarming in modern processors due to the recent emergence of Spectre and Meltdown attacks. A typical attack performs intentional cache access and manipulates cache states to leak secrets by…

Due to physical isolation as well as use of proprietary hardware and protocols, traditional real-time systems (RTS) were considered to be invulnerable to security breaches and external attacks. However, this assumption is being challenged…

Fault tolerance in multi-core architecture has attracted attention of research community for the past 20 years. Rapid improvements in the CMOS technology resulted in exponential growth of transistor density. It resulted in increased…

Since the advent of Spectre attacks, researchers and practitioners have developed a range of hardware and software measures to counter transient execution attacks. A prime example of such mitigation is speculative load hardening in LLVM,…

Embedded software is developed under the assumption that hardware execution is always correct. Fault attacks break and exploit that assumption. Through the careful introduction of targeted faults, an adversary modifies the control-flow or…

Spectre intrusions exploit speculative execution design vulnerabilities in modern processors. The attacks violate the principles of isolation in programs to gain unauthorized private user information. Current state-of-the-art detection…

Memory corruption vulnerabilities have been around for decades and rank among the most prevalent vulnerabilities in embedded systems. Yet this constrained environment poses unique design and implementation challenges that significantly…

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…

Correctness for microprocessors is generally understood to be conformance with the associated instruction set architecture (ISA). This is the basis for one of the most important abstractions in computer science, allowing hardware designers…

The recent Spectre attacks has demonstrated the fundamental insecurity of current computer microarchitecture. The attacks use features like pipelining, out-of-order and speculation to extract arbitrary information about the memory contents…

As malware, exploits, and cyber-attacks advance over time, so do the mitigation techniques available to the user. However, while attackers often abandon one form of exploitation in favor of a more lucrative one, mitigation techniques are…