Related papers: Exploiting CPU Clock Modulation for Covert Communi…
Covert channel networks are a well-known method for circumventing the security measures organizations put in place to protect their networks from adversarial attacks. This paper introduces a novel method based on bit-rate modulation for…
Covert channels are communication channels used by attackers to transmit information from a compromised system when the access control policy of the system does not allow doing so. Previous work has shown that CPU frequency scaling can be…
We present a novel mechanism to construct a covert channel based on page faults. A page fault is an event that occurs when a process or a thread tries to access a page of memory that is not currently mapped to its address space. The kernel…
Side channels remain a challenge to information flow control and security in modern computing platforms. Resource partitioning techniques that minimise the number of shared resources among processes are often used to address this challenge.…
Covert channel attacks have been continuously studied as severe threats to modern computing systems. Software-based covert channels are a typically hard-to-detect branch of these attacks, since they leverage virtual resources to establish…
Covert channel techniques are used by attackers to transfer data in a way prohibited by the security policy. There are two main categories of covert channels: timing channels and storage channels. This paper introduces a new storage channel…
Multi-process concurrency is effective in improving program efficiency and maximizing CPU utilization. The correct execution of concurrency is ensured by the mutual exclusion and synchronization mechanism (MESM) that manages the shared…
To operate efficiently across a wide range of workloads with varying power requirements, a modern processor applies different current management mechanisms, which briefly throttle instruction execution while they adjust voltage and…
Modern x86 processors have many prefetch instructions that can be used by programmers to boost performance. However, these instructions may also cause security problems. In particular, we found that on Intel processors, there are two…
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…
A network covert channel is created that operates by modulating the time between web resource accesses, with an 'average web user' read-time used as a reference. While the covert channel may be classified as timing based, it does not…
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,…
Recent discovery of security attacks in advanced processors, known as Spectre and Meltdown, has resulted in high public alertness about security of hardware. The root cause of these attacks is information leakage across "covert channels"…
Modern processors dynamically control their operating frequency to optimize resource utilization, maximize energy savings, and conform to system-defined constraints. If, during the execution of a software workload, the running average of…
Scientists have built a variety of covert channels for secretive information transmission with CPU cache and main memory. In this paper, we turn to a lower level in the memory hierarchy, i.e., persistent storage. Most programs store…
In this paper, we reveal the existence of a new class of prefetcher, the XPT prefetcher, in the modern Intel processors which has never been officially documented. It speculatively issues a load, bypassing last-level cache (LLC) lookups,…
The broadcast channel with confidential messages is a well studied scenario from the theoretical standpoint, but there is still lack of practical schemes able to achieve some fixed level of reliability and security over such a channel. In…
Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are a ubiquitous component across the range of today's computing platforms, from phones and tablets, through personal computers, to high-end server class platforms. With the increasing importance of graphics…
Modern processors use branch prediction and speculative execution to maximize performance. For example, if the destination of a branch depends on a memory value that is in the process of being read, CPUs will try guess the destination and…
Recent years have seen a surge in the number of data leaks despite aggressive information-containment measures deployed by cloud providers. When attackers acquire sensitive data in a secure cloud environment, covert communication channels…