Related papers: Prime+Retouch: When Cache is Locked and Leaked
Meltdown and Spectre exploit microarchitectural changes the CPU makes during transient out-of-order execution. Using side-channel techniques, these attacks enable leaking arbitrary data from memory. As state-of-the-art software mitigations…
Many cache designs have been proposed to guard against contention-based side-channel attacks. One well-known type of cache is the randomized remapping cache. Many randomized remapping caches provide fixed or over protection, which leads to…
Cache occupancy attacks exploit the shared nature of cache hierarchies to infer a victim's activities by monitoring overall cache usage, unlike access-driven cache attacks that focus on specific cache lines or sets. There exists some prior…
As cache-based side-channel attacks become serious security problems, various defenses have been proposed and deployed in both software and hardware. Consequently, cache-based side-channel attacks on processes co-residing on the same core…
Side-channel attacks on memory (SCAM) exploit unintended data leaks from memory subsystems to infer sensitive information, posing significant threats to system security. These attacks exploit vulnerabilities in memory access patterns, cache…
Modern processor designs use a variety of microarchitectural methods to achieve high performance. Unfortunately, new side-channels have often been uncovered that exploit these enhanced designs. One area that has received little attention…
The transient execution attack is a type of attack leveraging the vulnerability of modern CPU optimization technologies. New attacks surface rapidly. The side-channel is a key part of transient execution attacks to leak data. In this work,…
Hardware caches are essential performance optimization features in modern processors to reduce the effective memory access time. Unfortunately, they are also the prime targets for attacks on computer processors because they are…
Speculation is key to achieving high CPU performance, yet it enables risks like Spectre attacks which remain a significant challenge to mitigate without incurring substantial performance overheads. These attacks typically unfold in three…
The threats of physical side-channel attacks and their countermeasures have been widely researched. Most physical side-channel attacks rely on the unavoidable influence of computation or storage on current consumption or voltage drop on a…
Side-channel information leakage is a known limitation of SGX. Researchers have demonstrated that secret-dependent information can be extracted from enclave execution through page-fault access patterns. Consequently, various recent research…
Microarchitectural timing attacks exploit subtle timing variations caused by hardware behaviors to leak sensitive information. In this paper, we introduce MCHammer, a novel side-channel technique that leverages machine clears induced by…
Consider a set-associative cache with $p^n$ sets and $p^n$ ways where $p$ is prime and $n>0$. Furthermore, assume that the cache may be shared among $p^n$ mutually distrusting principals that may use the Prime+Probe side-channel attack…
There is a long history of side channels in the memory hierarchy of modern CPUs. Especially the cache side channel is widely used in the context of transient execution attacks and covert channels. Therefore, many secure cache architectures…
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…
Trusted execution environments (TEEs) offer hardware-assisted means to protect code and data. However, as shown in numerous results over the years, attackers can use side-channels to leak data access patterns and even single-step the code.…
Contemporary computing employs cache hierarchy to fill the speed gap between processors and main memories. In order to optimise system performance, Last Level Caches(LLC) are shared among all the cores. Cache sharing has made them an…
We present a software approach to mitigate access-driven side-channel attacks that leverage last-level caches (LLCs) shared across cores to leak information between security domains (e.g., tenants in a cloud). Our approach dynamically…
Large language models (LLMs) possess extensive knowledge and question-answering capabilities, having been widely deployed in privacy-sensitive domains like finance and medical consultation. During LLM inferences, cache-sharing methods are…
This paper evaluates new security threats due to the processor frontend in modern Intel processors. The root causes of the security threats are the multiple paths in the processor frontend that the micro-operations can take: through the…