Related papers: MCU-Wide Timing Side Channels and Their Detection

Side-channel attacks impose a serious threat to cryptographic algorithms, including widely employed ones, such as AES and RSA. These attacks take advantage of the algorithm implementation in hardware or software to extract secret…

We introduce a new timing side-channel attack on Intel CPU processors. Our Frontal attack exploits timing differences that arise from how the CPU frontend fetches and processes instructions while being interrupted. In particular, we observe…

Virtualization technology is nowadays adopted in security-critical embedded systems to achieve higher performance and more design flexibility. However, it also comes with new security threats, where attackers leverage timing covert channels…

The cloud model's dependence on massive parallelism and resource sharing exacerbates the security challenge of timing side-channels. Timing Information Flow Control (TIFC) is a novel adaptation of IFC techniques that may offer a way to…

DRAM chips are vulnerable to read disturbance phenomena (e.g., RowHammer and RowPress), where repeatedly accessing or keeping open a DRAM row causes bitflips in nearby rows. Attackers leverage RowHammer bitflips in real systems to take over…

Side channel attacks steal secret keys by cleverly leveraging information leakages and can, therefore, break encryption. Thus, detection and mitigation of side channel attacks is a very important problem, but the solutions proposed in the…

Secret-dependent timing behavior in cryptographic implementations has resulted in exploitable vulnerabilities, undermining their security. Over the years, numerous tools to automatically detect timing leakage or even to prove their absence…

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,…

Attacks based on side-channel analysis (SCA) pose a severe security threat to modern computing platforms, further exacerbated on IoT devices by their pervasiveness and handling of private and critical data. Designing SCA-resistant computing…

The drive to create thinner, lighter, and more energy efficient devices has resulted in modern SoCs being forced to balance a delicate tradeoff between power consumption, heat dissipation, and execution speed (i.e., frequency). While…

Cryptographic research takes software timing side channels seriously. Approaches to mitigate them include constant-time coding and techniques to enforce such practices. However, recent attacks like Meltdown [42], Spectre [37], and…

In recent years a new class of side-channel attacks has emerged. Instead of targeting device emissions during dynamic computation, adversaries now frequently exploit the leakage or response behaviour of integrated circuits in a static…

Modern x86 processors support an AVX instruction set to boost performance. However, this extension may cause security issues. We discovered that there are vulnerable properties in implementing masked load/store instructions. Based on this,…

In this paper, we consider that, in practice, attack scenarios involving side-channel analysis combine two successive phases:an analysis phase, targeting the extraction of information about the target and the identification of possible…

We introduce the first microarchitectural side channel attacks that leverage contention on the CPU ring interconnect. There are two challenges that make it uniquely difficult to exploit this channel. First, little is known about the ring…

To protect cryptographic implementations from side-channel vulnerabilities, developers must adopt constant-time programming practices. As these can be error-prone, many side-channel detection tools have been proposed. Despite this, such…

The implementations of most hardened cryptographic libraries use defensive programming techniques for side-channel resistance. These techniques are usually specified as guidelines to developers on specific code patterns to use or avoid.…

With increasingly sophisticated cyber-adversaries able to access a wider repertoire of mechanisms to implant malware such as ransomware, CPU/GPU keyloggers, and stealthy kernel rootkits, there is an urgent need for techniques to detect and…

Security in modern RISC-V processors demands more than functional correctness: It requires resilience to side-channel attacks. This paper evaluates the vulnerability of the side channel of the CVA6 RISC-V core by analyzing software-based…

The power consumption of a microprocessor is a huge channel for information leakage. While the most popular exploitation of this channel is to recover cryptographic keys from embedded devices, other applications such as mobile app…