Related papers: SPECRUN: The Danger of Speculative Runahead Execut…

In most split-tunnel VPN/ZTNA deployments, installing an internal route authorizes the entire device, not a specific application, to use it. An unprivileged malicious process can therefore reach internal services by reusing routes intended…

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…

This paper introduces Okapi, a new hardware/software cross-layer architecture designed to mitigate Transient Execution Side Channel attacks, including Spectre variants, in modern computing systems. Okapi provides a hardware basis for secure…

Despite their strong performance on reasoning tasks, large reasoning models (LRMs) often suffer from overthinking, producing unnecessarily long outputs and incurring high end-to-end latency, a significant limitation to their real-world…

The efficacy of address space layout randomization has been formally demonstrated in a shared-memory model by Abadi et al., contingent on specific assumptions about victim programs. However, modern operating systems, implementing layout…

Caches have been exploited to leak secret information due to the different times they take to handle memory accesses. Cache timing attacks include non-speculative cache side and covert channel attacks and cache-based speculative execution…

Distributed systems are becoming more common place, as computers typically contain multiple computation processors. The SpiNNaker architecture is such a distributed architecture, containing millions of cores connected with a unique…

Recent attacks have broken process isolation by exploiting microarchitectural side channels that allow indirect access to shared microarchitectural state. Enclaves strengthen the process abstraction to restore isolation guarantees. We…

Heterogeneous computing, which incorporates GPUs, NPUs, and FPGAs, is increasingly utilized to improve the efficiency of computer systems. However, this shift has given rise to significant security and privacy concerns, especially when the…

The practical applications based on recurrent spiking neurons are limited due to their non-trivial learning algorithms. The temporal nature of spiking neurons is more favorable for hardware implementation where signals can be represented in…

Backdoor attacks pose a persistent security risk to deep neural networks (DNNs) due to their stealth and durability. While recent research has explored leveraging model unlearning mechanisms to enhance backdoor concealment, existing attack…

Transient execution vulnerabilities have emerged as a critical threat to modern processors. Hardware fuzzing testing techniques have recently shown promising results in discovering transient execution bugs in large-scale out-of-order…

We introduce a new family of prompt injection attacks, termed Neural Exec. Unlike known attacks that rely on handcrafted strings (e.g., "Ignore previous instructions and..."), we show that it is possible to conceptualize the creation of…

The Spectre family of speculative execution attacks have required a rethinking of formal methods for security. Approaches based on operational speculative semantics have made initial inroads towards finding vulnerable code and validating…

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…

Many hardware structures in today's high-performance out-of-order processors do not scale in an efficient way. To address this, different solutions have been proposed that build execution schedules in an energy-efficient manner. Issue time…

Unsafe memory accesses in programs written using popular programming languages like C/C++ have been among the leading causes for software vulnerability. Prior memory safety checkers such as SoftBound enforce memory spatial safety by…

Speculative execution is crucial in enhancing modern processor performance but can introduce Spectre-type vulnerabilities that may leak sensitive information. Detecting Spectre gadgets from programs has been a research focus to enhance the…

Neural networks are vulnerable to backdoor poisoning attacks, where the attackers maliciously poison the training set and insert triggers into the test input to change the prediction of the victim model. Existing defenses for backdoor…

Micro-architectural attacks use information leaked through shared resources to break hardware-enforced isolation. These attacks have been used to steal private information ranging from cryptographic keys to privileged Operating System (OS)…