Related papers: Okapi: Efficiently Safeguarding Speculative Data A…
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…
Spectre attacks exploit microprocessor speculative execution to read and transmit forbidden data outside the attacker's trust domain and sandbox. Recent hardware schemes allow potentially-unsafe speculative accesses but prevent the secret's…
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…
Practical attacks that exploit speculative execution can leak confidential information via microarchitectural side channels. The recently-demonstrated Spectre attacks leverage speculative loads which circumvent access checks to read…
New speculation-based attacks that affect large numbers of modern systems are disclosed regularly. Currently, CPU vendors regularly fall back to heavy-handed mitigations like using barriers or enforcing strict programming guidelines…
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…
Speculative execution attacks leverage the speculative and out-of-order execution features in modern computer processors to access secret data or execute code that should not be executed. Secret information can then be leaked through a…
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…
The disclosure of the Spectre speculative-execution attacks in January 2018 has left a severe vulnerability that systems are still struggling with how to patch. The solutions that currently exist tend to have incomplete coverage, perform…
Okapi is a new causally consistent geo-replicated key- value store. Okapi leverages two key design choices to achieve high performance. First, it relies on hybrid logical/physical clocks to achieve low latency even in the presence of clock…
Speculative execution enhances processor performance by predicting intermediate results and executing instructions based on these predictions. However, incorrect predictions can lead to security vulnerabilities, as speculative instructions…
Microarchitectural attacks represent a challenging and persistent threat to modern processors, exploiting inherent design vulnerabilities in processors to leak sensitive information or compromise systems. Of particular concern is the…
Speculation is key to achieving high CPU performance, yet it enables risks like Spectre attacks which remain a significant challenge to mitigate without incurring substantial performance overheads. These attacks typically unfold in three…
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…
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…
Side-channel attacks such as Spectre that utilize speculative execution to steal application secrets pose a significant threat to modern computing systems. While program transformations can mitigate some Spectre attacks, more advanced…
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…
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 processors use branch prediction and speculative execution to maximize performance. For example, if the destination of a branch depends on a memory value that is in the process of being read, CPUs will try guess the destination and…
We propose Okapi, a simple, efficient, and general method for robust semi-supervised learning based on online statistical matching. Our method uses a nearest-neighbours-based matching procedure to generate cross-domain views for a…