Related papers: Prime+Retouch: When Cache is Locked and Leaked

Spin Transfer Torque RAM (STTRAM) is a promising candidate for Last Level Cache (LLC) due to high endurance, high density and low leakage. One of the major disadvantages of STTRAM is high write latency and write current. Additionally, the…

Diffusion models are a powerful class of generative models that produce images and other content from user prompts, but they are computationally intensive. To mitigate this cost, recent academic and industry work has adopted approximate…

Intel SGX and hypervisors isolate non-privileged programs from other software, ensuring confidentiality and integrity. However, side-channel attacks continue to threaten Intel SGX's security, enabling malicious OS to manipulate PTE present…

For nearly a decade the academic community has investigated backdoors in neural networks, primarily focusing on classification tasks where adversaries manipulate the model prediction. While demonstrably malicious, the immediate real-world…

How will future microarchitectures impact the security of existing cryptographic implementations? As we cannot keep reducing the size of transistors, chip vendors have started developing new microarchitectural optimizations to speed up…

Attacks like Spectre abuse speculative execution, one of the key performance optimizations of modern CPUs. Recently, several testing tools have emerged to automatically detect speculative leaks in commercial (black-box) CPUs. However, the…

Research on transient execution attacks including Spectre and Meltdown showed that exception or branch misprediction events might leave secret-dependent traces in the CPU's microarchitectural state. This observation led to a proliferation…

In recent years, the size and leakage energy consumption of large last level caches (LLCs) has increased. To address this, embedded DRAM (eDRAM) caches have been considered which have lower leakage energy consumption; however eDRAM caches…

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…

This paper investigates an emerging cache side channel attack defense approach involving the use of hardware performance counters (HPCs). These counters monitor microarchitectural events and analyze statistical deviations to differentiate…

Model extraction is a growing concern for the security of AI systems. For deep neural network models, the architecture is the most important information an adversary aims to recover. Being a sequence of repeated computation blocks, neural…

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…

This paper provides the first systematic analysis of a synergistic threat model encompassing memory corruption vulnerabilities and microarchitectural side-channel vulnerabilities. We study speculative shield bypass attacks that leverage…

To mitigate the performance gap between CPU and the main memory, multi-level cache architectures are widely used in modern processors. Therefore, modeling the behaviors of the downstream caches becomes a critical part of the processor…

Double-fetch bugs are a special type of race condition, where an unprivileged execution thread is able to change a memory location between the time-of-check and time-of-use of a privileged execution thread. If an unprivileged attacker…

Next-generation mobile networks are expected to facilitate fast AI model downloading to end users. By caching models on edge servers, mobile networks can deliver models to end users with low latency, resulting in a paradigm of edge model…

The adversarial model presented by trusted execution environments (TEEs) has prompted researchers to investigate unusual attack vectors. One particularly powerful class of controlled-channel attacks abuses page-table modifications to…

In modern server CPUs, the Last-Level Cache (LLC) serves not only as a victim cache for higher-level private caches but also as a buffer for low-latency DMA transfers between CPU cores and I/O devices through Direct Cache Access (DCA).…

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 confidentiality of trained AI models on edge devices is at risk from side-channel attacks exploiting power and electromagnetic emissions. This paper proposes a novel training methodology to enhance resilience against such threats by…