Related papers: Synthesizing Hardware-Software Leakage Contracts f…

This project focuses on making a RISC-V CPU Core using the Logisim software. RISC-V is significant because it will allow smaller device manufacturers to build hardware without paying royalties and allow developers and researchers to design…

New hardware primitives such as Intel SGX secure a user-level process in presence of an untrusted or compromised OS. Such "enclaved execution" systems are vulnerable to several side-channels, one of which is the page fault channel. In this…

Over the years, many techniques have been introduced to protect integrated circuits (ICs) from hardware security threats that emerged in the globalized IC manufacturing supply chain, such as overproduction and piracy. However, most of these…

The Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) is the contract between compilers and processors; proving this contract formally demands cross-level connection to existing mechanized compilers and hardware implementations. As an open, modular ISA…

While most instruction set architectures (ISAs) are only available to use through the purchase of a restrictive commercial license, the RISC-V ISA presents a free and open-source alternative. Due to this availability, many free and…

Side-channel attacks impose a serious threat to cryptographic algorithms, including widely employed ones, such as AES and RSA. These attacks take advantage of the algorithm implementation in hardware or software to extract secret…

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…

Recent transient-execution attacks, such as RIDL, Fallout, and ZombieLoad, demonstrated that attackers can leak information while it transits through microarchitectural buffers. Named Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) by Intel, these…

In this paper, we take a deep dive into microarchitectural security from a hardware designer's perspective by reviewing the existing approaches to detect hardware vulnerabilities during the design phase. We show that a protection gap…

With the exponential rise in the use of cloud services, smart devices, and IoT devices, advanced cyber attacks have become increasingly sophisticated and ubiquitous. Furthermore, the rapid evolution of computing architectures and memory…

Numerous security threats are emerging from untrusted players in the integrated circuit (IC) ecosystem. Among them, reverse engineering practices with the intent to counterfeit, overproduce, or modify an IC are worrying. In recent years,…

While side-channel leakage is traditionally evaluated from a fabricated chip, it is more time-efficient and cost-effective to do so during the design phase of the chip. We present a methodology to rank the gates of a design according to…

Recent advancements in quantization and mixed-precision approaches offers substantial opportunities to improve the speed and energy efficiency of Neural Networks (NN). Research has shown that individual parameters with varying low…

Side-channel attacks on microprocessors, like the RISC-V, exhibit security vulnerabilities that lead to several design challenges. Hence, it is imperative to study and analyze these security vulnerabilities comprehensively. In this paper,…

The gamut of todays internet-connected embedded devices has led to increased concerns regarding the security and confidentiality of data. Most internet-connected embedded devices employ mathematically secure cryptographic algorithms to…

RISC-V is a recently developed open instruction set architecture gaining a lot of attention. To achieve a lasting security on these systems and design efficient countermeasures, a better understanding of vulnerabilities to novel and…

While cryptographic algorithms such as the ubiquitous Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) are secure, *physical implementations* of these algorithms in hardware inevitably 'leak' sensitive data such as cryptographic keys. A particularly…

The run-time electromagnetic (EM) emanation of microprocessors presents a side-channel that leaks the confidentiality of the applications running on them. Many recent works have demonstrated successful attacks leveraging such side-channels…

Spectre intrusions exploit speculative execution design vulnerabilities in modern processors. The attacks violate the principles of isolation in programs to gain unauthorized private user information. Current state-of-the-art detection…

Discovering new vulnerabilities and implementing security and privacy measures are important to protect systems and data against physical attacks. One such vulnerability is impedance, an inherent property of a device that can be exploited…