Related papers: Okapi: Efficiently Safeguarding Speculative Data A…
The prevalence of memory corruption bugs in the past decades resulted in numerous defenses, such as stack canaries, control flow integrity (CFI), and memory safe languages. These defenses can prevent entire classes of vulnerabilities, and…
Oblivious RAM (ORAM) is a provable secure primitive to prevent access pattern leakage on the memory bus. It serves as the intermediate layer between the trusted on-chip components and the untrusted external memory systems to modulate the…
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…
Modern microarchitectures incorporate optimization techniques such as speculative loads and store forwarding to improve the memory bottleneck. The processor executes the load speculatively before the stores, and forwards the data of a…
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…
Side-channel attacks pose serious threats to many security models, especially sandbox-based browsers. While transient-execution side channels in out-of-order processors have previously been blamed for vulnerabilities such as Spectre and…
Large language models increasingly use external tools such as web search and document retrieval to solve information-intensive tasks. However, multi-hop tool use in complex tasks introduces substantial latency, since the model must…
PCBs are the core components for the devices ranging from the consumer electronics to military applications. Due to the accessibility of the PCBs, they are vulnerable to the attacks such as probing, eavesdropping, and reverse engineering.…
In the quest for efficiency and performance, edge-computing providers eliminate isolation boundaries between tenants, such as strict process isolation, and instead let them compute in a more lightweight multi-threaded single-process design.…
Modern out-of-order CPUs heavily rely on speculative execution for performance optimization, with branch prediction serving as a cornerstone to minimize stalls and maximize efficiency. Whenever shared branch prediction resources lack proper…
A recent discovery of a new class of microarchitectural attacks called Spectre picked up the attention of the security community as these attacks can circumvent many traditional mechanisms of defense. One of the attacks---Bounds Check…
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…
Since the advent of SPECTRE, a number of countermeasures have been proposed and deployed. Rigorously reasoning about their effectiveness, however, requires a well-defined notion of security against speculative execution attacks, which has…
Whenever modern CPUs encounter a conditional branch for which the condition cannot be evaluated yet, they predict the likely branch target and speculatively execute code. Such pipelining is key to optimizing runtime performance and is…
APIs have become the prominent technology of choice for achieving inter-service communications. The growth of API deployments has driven the urgency in addressing its lack of security standards. API Security is a topic for concern given the…
This paper describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of Otak, a system that allows two non-colluding cloud providers to run machine learning (ML) inference without knowing the inputs to inference. Prior work for this problem…
Integrity checking is ubiquitous in data networks, but not all network traffic needs integrity protection. Many applications can tolerate slightly damaged data while still working acceptably, trading accuracy versus efficiency to save time…
Embedded devices face an ever-expanding threat landscape: vulnerabilities in application software, operating system kernels, and peripherals threaten the embedded device integrity. Existing computer-architectural defenses fully consider at…
In the last years, a series of side channels have been discovered on CPUs. These side channels have been used in powerful attacks, e.g., on cryptographic implementations, or as building blocks in transient-execution attacks such as Spectre…
We describe Swivel, a new compiler framework for hardening WebAssembly (Wasm) against Spectre attacks. Outside the browser, Wasm has become a popular lightweight, in-process sandbox and is, for example, used in production to isolate…