Related papers: This is How You Lose the Transient Execution War
Analyzing the behavior of a program running on a processor that supports speculative execution is crucial for applications such as execution time estimation and side channel detection. Unfortunately, existing static analysis techniques…
Speculative execution is an optimization technique that has been part of CPUs for over a decade. It predicts the outcome and target of branch instructions to avoid stalling the execution pipeline. However, until recently, the security…
Recently, out-of-order execution, an important performance optimization in modern high-end processors, has been revealed to pose a significant security threat, allowing information leaks across security domains. In particular, the Meltdown…
The Spectre vulnerability in modern processors has been widely reported. The key insight in this vulnerability is that speculative execution in processors can be misused to access the secrets. Subsequently, even though the speculatively…
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…
Variational execution is a novel dynamic analysis technique for exploring highly configurable systems and accurately tracking information flow. It is able to efficiently analyze many configurations by aggressively sharing redundancies 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…
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…
Spectre v1 attacks, which exploit conditional branch misprediction, are often identified with attacks that bypass array bounds checking to leak data from a victim's memory. Generally, however, Spectre v1 attacks can exploit any conditional…
Neural networks have been proven to be vulnerable to a variety of adversarial attacks. From a safety perspective, highly sparse adversarial attacks are particularly dangerous. On the other hand the pixelwise perturbations of sparse attacks…
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…
Speculative side-channel attacks access sensitive data and use transmitters to leak the data during wrong-path execution. Various defenses have been proposed to prevent such information leakage. However, not all speculatively executed…
Spectre attacks and their many subsequent variants are a new vulnerability class affecting modern CPUs. The attacks rely on the ability to misguide speculative execution, generally by exploiting the branch prediction structures, to execute…
In this study, we conduct a comprehensive review of smart grid security, exploring system architectures, attack methodologies, defense strategies, and future research opportunities. We provide an in-depth analysis of various attack vectors,…
LFENCE/JMP is an existing software mitigation option for Branch Target Injection (BTI) and similar transient execution attacks stemming from indirect branch predictions, which is commonly used on AMD processors. However, the effectiveness…
Modern processors have suffered a deluge of threats exploiting branch instruction collisions inside the branch prediction unit (BPU), from eavesdropping on secret-related branch operations to triggering malicious speculative executions.…
We propose a symbolic execution method for analyzing the safety of software under fault attacks both accurately and efficiently. Fault attacks leverage physically injected hardware faults in an embedded system to break the safety of a…
Transfer adversarial attacks raise critical security concerns in real-world, black-box scenarios. However, the actual progress of this field is difficult to assess due to two common limitations in existing evaluations. First, different…
Neural networks have become pervasive across various applications, including security-related products. However, their widespread adoption has heightened concerns regarding vulnerability to adversarial attacks. With emerging regulations and…
In recent years, despite significant advancements in adversarial attack research, the security challenges in cross-modal scenarios, such as the transferability of adversarial attacks between infrared, thermal, and RGB images, have been…