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Timing-based side and covert channels in processor caches continue to be a threat to modern computers. This work shows for the first time a systematic, large-scale analysis of Arm devices and the detailed results of attacks the processors…

Microcontroller systems are integral to our daily lives, powering mission-critical applications such as vehicles, medical devices, and industrial control systems. Therefore, it is essential to investigate and outline the challenges…

Not long ago, it was thought that only software applications and general purpose digital systems i.e. computers were prone to various types of attacks against their security. The underlying hardware, hardware implementations of these…

Attacks on the microarchitecture of modern processors have become a practical threat to security and privacy in desktop and cloud computing. Recently, cache attacks have successfully been demonstrated on ARM based mobile devices, suggesting…

In recent years we have seen an explosion in the usage of low-cost, low-power microcontrollers (MCUs) in embedded devices around us due to the popularity of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Although this is good from an economics…

Security of embedded computing systems is becoming of paramount concern as these devices become more ubiquitous, contain personal information and are increasingly used for financial transactions. Security attacks targeting embedded systems…

In this work we present the Secure Machine, SeM for short, a CPU architecture extension for secure computing. SeM uses a small amount of in-chip additional hardware that monitors key communication channels inside the CPU chip, and only acts…

Internet of Things (IoT) devices have been increasingly integrated into our daily life. However, such smart devices suffer a broad attack surface. Particularly, attacks targeting the device software at runtime are challenging to defend…

Today's microprocessors have grown significantly in complexity and functionality. Most of today's processors provide at least three levels of memory hierarchy, are heavily pipelined, and support some sort of cache coherency protocol. These…

Micro-controller units (MCUs) implement the de facto interface between the physical and digital worlds. As a consequence, they appear in a variety of sensing/actuation applications, from smart personal spaces to complex industrial control…

With the significant development of the Internet of Things and low-cost cloud services, the sensory and data processing requirements of IoT systems are continually going up. TrustZone is a hardware-protected Trusted Execution Environment…

Protecting embedded security is becoming an increasingly challenging research problem for embedded systems due to a number of emerging trends in hardware, software, networks, and applications. Without fundamental advances in, and an…

Microcode is an abstraction layer used by modern x86 processors that interprets user-visible CISC instructions to hardware-internal RISC instructions. The capability to update x86 microcode enables a vendor to modify CPU behavior in-field,…

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…

The power consumption of a microprocessor is a huge channel for information leakage. While the most popular exploitation of this channel is to recover cryptographic keys from embedded devices, other applications such as mobile app…

Embedded devices are ubiquitous. However, preliminary evidence shows that attack mitigations protecting our desktops/servers/phones are missing in embedded devices, posing a significant threat to embedded security. To this end, this paper…

With the increasing complexity of embedded systems, the firmware has become a valuable asset. At the same time, pressure for cost reductions in hardware is imminent. These two aspects are united at the heart of the system, i.e., the…

As more and more embedded devices are connected to the Internet, leading to the emergence of Internet-of-Things (IoT), previously less tested (and insecure) devices are exposed to miscreants. To prevent them from being compromised, the…

We present the first comprehensive analysis of ARM MTE hardware performance on four different microarchitectures: ARM Big (A7x), Little (A5x), and Performance (Cortex-X) cores on the Google Pixel 8 and Pixel 9, and on Ampere Computing's…

Memory safety remains a critical and widely violated property in reality. Numerous defense techniques have been proposed and developed but most of them are not applied or enabled by default in production-ready environment due to their…