Related papers: Beyond Over-Protection: A Targeted Approach to Spe…

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…

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…

We present uSpectre, a new class of transient execution attacks that exploit microcode branch mispredictions to transiently leak sensitive data. We find that many long-known and recently-discovered transient execution attacks, which were…

Spectre vulnerabilities violate our fundamental assumptions about architectural abstractions, allowing attackers to steal sensitive data despite previously state-of-the-art countermeasures. To defend against Spectre, developers of…

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…

Spectre attacks disclosed in early 2018 expose data leakage scenarios via cache side channels. Specifically, speculatively executed paths due to branch mis-prediction may bring secret data into the cache which are then exposed via cache…

This paper introduces Triosecuris, a formally verified defense against Spectre BTB, RSB, and PHT that combines CET-style hardware-assisted control-flow integrity with compiler-inserted speculative load hardening (SLH). Triosecuris is based…

Spectre attacks enable an attacker to access restricted data in an application's memory. Both the academic community and industry veterans have developed several mitigations to block Spectre attacks, but to date, very few have been formally…

Constant-time (CT) verification tools are commonly used for detecting potential side-channel vulnerabilities in cryptographic libraries. Recently, a new class of tools, called speculative constant-time (SCT) tools, has also been used for…

The rapid evolution of malware attacks calls for the development of innovative detection methods, especially in resource-constrained edge computing. Traditional detection techniques struggle to keep up with modern malware's sophistication…

Machine learning algorithms are increasingly being applied in security-related tasks such as spam and malware detection, although their security properties against deliberate attacks have not yet been widely understood. Intelligent and…

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…

The growing gap between the increasing complexity of large language models (LLMs) and the limited computational budgets of edge devices poses a key challenge for efficient on-device inference, despite gradual improvements in hardware…

Spectre attacks exploit speculative execution to leak sensitive information. In the last few years, a number of static side-channel detectors have been proposed to detect cache leakage in the presence of speculative execution. However,…

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…

Prompt injection threatens novel applications that emerge from adapting LLMs for various user tasks. The newly developed LLM-based software applications become more ubiquitous and diverse. However, the threat of prompt injection attacks…

Software security vulnerabilities allow attackers to perform malicious activities to disrupt software operations. Recent Transformer-based language models have significantly advanced vulnerability detection, surpassing the capabilities of…

Meltdown and Spectre exploit microarchitectural changes the CPU makes during transient out-of-order execution. Using side-channel techniques, these attacks enable leaking arbitrary data from memory. As state-of-the-art software mitigations…

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…

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…