Related papers: Synthesizing Hardware-Software Leakage Contracts f…
Software composition analysis (SCA) denotes the process of identifying open-source software components in an input software application. SCA has been extensively developed and adopted by academia and industry. However, we notice that the…
The importance of preventing microarchitectural timing side channels in security-critical applications has surged in recent years. Constant-time programming has emerged as a best-practice technique for preventing the leakage of secret…
Microarchitectural timing attacks are a type of information leakage attack, which exploit the time-shared microarchitectural components, such as caches, translation look-aside buffers (TLBs), branch prediction unit (BPU), and speculative…
The recent Spectre attacks have demonstrated that modern microarchitectural optimizations can make software insecure. These attacks use features like pipelining, out-of-order and speculation to extract information about the memory contents…
The recent discovery of the Spectre and Meltdown attacks represents a watershed moment not just for the field of Computer Security, but also of Programming Languages. This paper explores speculative side-channel attacks and their…
Cryptographic computations are fundamental to modern computing, ensuring data confidentiality and integrity. However, these operations are highly vulnerable to power side-channel attacks that exploit variations in power consumption to leak…
Modern multi-core processors share cache resources for maximum cache utilization and performance gains. However, this leaves the cache vulnerable to side-channel attacks, where timing differences in shared cache behavior are exploited to…
Pre-silicon side-channel leakage assessment is a useful tool to identify hardware vulnerabilities at design time, but it requires many high-resolution power traces and increases the power simulation cost of the design. By downsampling and…
Constant-time code has become the de-facto standard for secure cryptographic implementations. However, some memory-based leakage classes such as ciphertext side-channels and silent stores remain unaddressed. Prior work proposed three…
The Internet of Things (IoT) is an ongoing technological revolution. Embedded processors are the processing engines of smart IoT devices. For decades, these processors were mainly based on the Arm instruction set architecture (ISA). In…
Smart contract vulnerabilities in Decentralized Finance caused over billions of dollars losses every year, yet the security community faces a critical bottleneck: identifying a vulnerability is not the same as proving it is exploitable.…
RISC-V is an open-source hardware ISA based on the RISC design principles, and has been the subject of some novel ROP mitigation technique proposals due to its open-source nature. However, very little work has actually evaluated whether…
Fault injection attacks (FIA) pose significant security threats to embedded systems as they exploit weaknesses across multiple layers, including system software, instruction set architecture (ISA), microarchitecture, and physical hardware.…
Transient execution attacks utilize micro-architectural covert channels to leak secrets that should not have been accessible during logical program execution. Commonly used micro-architectural covert channels are those that leave lasting…
Timing channels are information flows, encoded in the relative timing of events, that bypass the system's protection mechanisms. Any microarchitectural state that depends on execution history and affects the rate of progress of later…
The broad landscape of new applications requires minimal hardware resources without any sacrifice in Quality-of-Results. Approximate Computing (AC) has emerged to meet the demands of data-rich applications. Although AC applies techniques to…
Rising device use and third-party IP integration in semiconductors raise security concerns. Unauthorized access, fault injection, and privacy invasion are potential threats from untrusted actors. Different security techniques have been…
Memory consistency models (MCMs) which govern inter-module interactions in a shared memory system, are a significant, yet often under-appreciated, aspect of system design. MCMs are defined at the various layers of the hardware-software…
Power side-channel attacks (SCAs) have become a major concern to the security community due to their non-invasive feature, low-cost, and effectiveness in extracting secret information from hardware implementation of cryto algorithms.…
Cache side-channel attacks extract secrets by examining how victim software accesses cache. To date, practical attacks on cryptosystems and media libraries are demonstrated under different scenarios, inferring secret keys and reconstructing…