Related papers: VeriFence: Lightweight and Precise Spectre Defense…
Confidential Computing (CC) has received increasing attention in recent years as a mechanism to protect user data from untrusted operating systems (OSes). Existing CC solutions hide confidential memory from the OS and/or encrypt it to…
Application compartmentalization and privilege separation are our primary weapons against ever-increasing security threats and privacy concerns on connected devices. Despite significant progress, it is still challenging to privilege…
Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) have been introduced as essential and popular security gates that inspect incoming HTTP traffic to filter out malicious requests and provide defenses against a diverse array of web-based threats. Evading…
Operating systems rely on system calls to allow the controlled communication of isolated processes with the kernel and other processes. Every system call includes a processor mode switch from the unprivileged user mode to the privileged…
The efficacy of address space layout randomization has been formally demonstrated in a shared-memory model by Abadi et al., contingent on specific assumptions about victim programs. However, modern operating systems, implementing layout…
Over the last years, security kernels have played a promising role in reshaping the landscape of platform security on today's ubiquitous embedded devices. Security kernels, such as separation kernels, enable constructing high-assurance…
Modern database systems increasingly co-schedule time-sensitive and background tasks. In such mixed workloads, background tasks should ideally utilize only spare CPU capacity without interfering with latency-critical requests. While some…
Concurrency is vital for our critical software to meet modern performance requirements, yet concurrency bugs are notoriously difficult to detect and reproduce. Controlled Concurrency Testing (CCT) can make bugs easier to expose by enabling…
Peer-to-peer networks are an attractive alternative to classical client-server architectures in several fields of application such as voice-over-IP telephony and file sharing. Recently, a new peer-to-peer solution called the InterPlanetary…
Practical attacks that exploit speculative execution can leak confidential information via microarchitectural side channels. The recently-demonstrated Spectre attacks leverage speculative loads which circumvent access checks to read…
The growing interest in reliable multi-party applications has fostered widespread adoption of Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols. Existing BFT protocols need f more replicas than Paxos-style protocols to prevent equivocation…
Since the advent of Spectre attacks, researchers and practitioners have developed a range of hardware and software measures to counter transient execution attacks. A prime example of such mitigation is speculative load hardening in LLVM,…
Memory-safety violations in C and C++ programs continue to enable sophisticated exploitation techniques such as control-flow hijacking and data-oriented attacks. Existing hardware defenses either rely on address space layout randomization…
In an era of pervasive online surveillance, Internet users are in need of better anonymity solutions for online communications without sacrificing performance. Existing overlay anonymity tools, such as the Tor network, suffer from…
New speculation-based attacks that affect large numbers of modern systems are disclosed regularly. Currently, CPU vendors regularly fall back to heavy-handed mitigations like using barriers or enforcing strict programming guidelines…
Android apps have become a valuable target for app modifiers and imitators due to its popularity and being trusted with highly sensitive data. Packers, on the other hand, protect apps from tampering with various anti-analysis techniques…
Control-flow leakage (CFL) attacks enable an attacker to expose control-flow decisions of a victim program via side-channel observations. Linearization (i.e., elimination) of secret-dependent control flow is the main countermeasure against…
Although ransomware has received broad attention in media and research, this evolving threat vector still poses a systematic threat. Related literature has explored their detection using various approaches leveraging Machine and Deep…
The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is a standardised interface between the firmware and the operating system used in all x86-based platforms over the past ten years. A side effect of the transition from conventional BIOS…
Cache side channel attacks are increasingly alarming in modern processors due to the recent emergence of Spectre and Meltdown attacks. A typical attack performs intentional cache access and manipulates cache states to leak secrets by…