Related papers: Write+Sync: Software Cache Write Covert Channels E…

Scientists have built a variety of covert channels for secretive information transmission with CPU cache and main memory. In this paper, we turn to a lower level in the memory hierarchy, i.e., persistent storage. Most programs store…

Operating Systems enforce logical isolation using abstractions such as processes, containers, and isolation technologies to protect a system from malicious or buggy code. In this paper, we show new types of side channels through the file…

Multi-process concurrency is effective in improving program efficiency and maximizing CPU utilization. The correct execution of concurrency is ensured by the mutual exclusion and synchronization mechanism (MESM) that manages the shared…

Research on cache attacks has shown that CPU caches leak significant information. Proposed detection mechanisms assume that all cache attacks cause more cache hits and cache misses than benign applications and use hardware performance…

Caches have been used to construct various types of covert and side channels to leak information. Most existing cache channels exploit the timing difference between cache hits and cache misses. However, we introduce a new and broader…

We present a new hardware-agnostic side-channel attack that targets one of the most fundamental software caches in modern computer systems: the operating system page cache. The page cache is a pure software cache that contains all…

Timing side channels have been used to extract cryptographic keys and sensitive documents, even from trusted enclaves. In this paper, we focus on cache side channels created by access to shared code or data in the memory hierarchy. This…

This research analyzed the performance and consistency of four synchronization mechanisms-reentrant locks, semaphores, synchronized methods, and synchronized blocks-across three operating systems: macOS, Windows, and Linux. Synchronization…

Covert channels can be utilized to secretly deliver information from high privileged processes to low privileged processes in the context of a high-assurance computing system. In this case study, we investigate the possibility of covert…

Flash-based disk caches, for example Bcache and Flashcache, has gained tremendous popularity in industry in the last decade because of its low energy consumption, non-volatile nature and high I/O speed. But these cache systems have a worse…

Distributed filesystem metadata updates are typically synchronous. This creates inherent challenges for access efficiency, load balancing, and directory contention, especially under dynamic and skewed workloads. This paper argues that…

We introduce IMPACT, a set of high-throughput main memory-based timing attacks that leverage characteristics of processing-in-memory (PiM) architectures to establish covert and side channels. IMPACT enables high-throughput communication and…

Timing and cache side channels provide powerful attacks against many sensitive operations including cryptographic implementations. Existing defenses cannot protect against all classes of such attacks without incurring prohibitive…

In heterogeneous SoCs, accelerators like integrated GPUs (iGPUs) are integrated on the same chip as CPUs, sharing the memory subsystem. In such systems, the massive memory requests from throughput-oriented accelerators significantly…

We propose a novel solid-state disk (SSD) architecture that utilizes a double-data-rate synchronous NAND flash interface for improving read and write performance. Unlike the conventional design, the data transfer rate in the proposed design…

Caching is crucial for enabling high-throughput networks for data intensive applications. Traditional caching technology relies on DRAM, as it can transfer data at a high rate. However, DRAM capacity is subject to contention by most system…

Coded caching is used to reduce network congestion during peak hours. A single server is connected to a set of users through a bottleneck link, which generally is assumed to be error-free. During non-peak hours, all the users have full…

Work Stealing has been a very successful algorithm for scheduling parallel computations, and is known to achieve high performances even for computations exhibiting fine-grained parallelism. We present a variant of \ws\ that provably avoids…

There is a long history of side channels in the memory hierarchy of modern CPUs. Especially the cache side channel is widely used in the context of transient execution attacks and covert channels. Therefore, many secure cache architectures…

Synchronization channels, such as the well-known deletion channel, are surprisingly harder to analyze than memoryless channels, and they are a source of many fundamental problems in information theory and theoretical computer science. One…