Related papers: Testing side-channel security of cryptographic imp…
The complexity of modern processor architectures has given rise to sophisticated interactions among their components. Such interactions may result in potential attack vectors in terms of side channels, possibly available to user-land…
This work presents a new tool to verify the correctness of cryptographic implementations with respect to cache attacks. Our methodology discovers vulnerabilities that are hard to find with other techniques, observed as exploitable leakage.…
Modern processors are highly optimized systems where every single cycle of computation time matters. Many optimizations depend on the data that is being processed. Software-based microarchitectural attacks exploit effects of these…
Side-channel attacks have become a severe threat to the confidentiality of computer applications and systems. One popular type of such attacks is the microarchitectural attack, where the adversary exploits the hardware features to break the…
There is a growing need for hardware-software contracts which precisely define the implications of microarchitecture on software security-i.e., security contracts. It is our view that such contracts should explicitly account for…
When implementing secure software, developers must ensure certain requirements, such as the erasure of secret data after its use and execution in real time. Such requirements are not explicitly captured by the C language and could…
The implementations of most hardened cryptographic libraries use defensive programming techniques for side-channel resistance. These techniques are usually specified as guidelines to developers on specific code patterns to use or avoid.…
Secret-dependent timing behavior in cryptographic implementations has resulted in exploitable vulnerabilities, undermining their security. Over the years, numerous tools to automatically detect timing leakage or even to prove their absence…
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…
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…
Microarchitectural side channels expose unprotected software to information leakage attacks where a software adversary is able to track runtime behavior of a benign process and steal secrets such as cryptographic keys. As suggested by…
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…
We systematize software side-channel attacks with a focus on vulnerabilities and countermeasures in the cryptographic implementations. Particularly, we survey past research literature to categorize vulnerable implementations, and identify…
Self-modifying code (SMC) allows programs to alter their own instructions, optimizing performance and functionality on x86 processors. Despite its benefits, SMC introduces unique microarchitectural behaviors that can be exploited for…
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have transformed natural language understanding and generation, leading to extensive benchmarking across diverse tasks. However, cryptanalysis - a critical area for data security and its…
Recent work has shown that out-of-order and speculative execution mechanisms used to increase performance in the majority of processors expose the processors to critical attacks. These attacks, called Meltdown and Spectre, exploit the side…
Lightweight cryptography is a novel diversion from conventional cryptography that targets internet-of-things (IoT) platform due to resource constraints. In comparison, it offers smaller cryptographic primitives such as shorter key sizes,…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in sensitive domains including healthcare, legal services, and confidential communications, where privacy is paramount. This paper introduces Whisper Leak, a side-channel attack that…
CPUs provide isolation mechanisms like virtualization and privilege levels to protect software. Yet these focus on architectural isolation while typically overlooking microarchitectural side channels, exemplified by Meltdown and Foreshadow.…
Microarchitectural attacks compromise security by exploiting software-visible artifacts of microarchitectural optimizations such as caches and speculative execution. Defending against such attacks at the software level requires an…