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Speculative execution attacks undermine the security of constant-time programming, the standard technique used to prevent microarchitectural side channels in security-sensitive software such as cryptographic code. Constant-time code must…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-12-18 Rutvik Choudhary , Alan Wang , Zirui Neil Zhao , Adam Morrison , Christopher W. Fletcher

The recent Spectre attacks exploit speculative execution, a pervasively used feature of modern microprocessors, to allow the exfiltration of sensitive data across protection boundaries. In this paper, we introduce a new Spectre-class attack…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-07-23 Esmaeil Mohammadian Koruyeh , Khaled Khasawneh , Chengyu Song , Nael Abu-Ghazaleh

As large language models (LLMs) increasingly integrate native code interpreters, they enable powerful real-time execution capabilities, substantially expanding their utility. However, such integrations introduce potential system-level…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Gabriel Chua

We introduce a novel approach to secure compilation based on maps of distributive laws. We demonstrate through four examples that the coherence criterion for maps of distributive laws can potentially be a viable alternative for compiler…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2020-04-22 Stelios Tsampas , Andreas Nuyts , Dominique Devriese , Frank Piessens

Microarchitectural attacks represent a challenging and persistent threat to modern processors, exploiting inherent design vulnerabilities in processors to leak sensitive information or compromise systems. Of particular concern is the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Mohamadreza Rostami , Shaza Zeitouni , Rahul Kande , Chen Chen , Pouya Mahmoody , Jeyavijayan , Rajendran , Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi

Man-At-The-End (MATE) attackers are almighty adversaries against whom there exists no silver-bullet countermeasure. To raise the bar, a wide range of protection measures were proposed in the literature each of which adds resilience against…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-09-26 Mohsen Ahmadvand , Dennis Fischer , Sebastian Banescu

Spectre attacks enable an attacker to access restricted data in an application's memory. Both the academic community and industry veterans have developed several mitigations to block Spectre attacks, but to date, very few have been formally…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-08-03 Sunjay Cauligi , Marco Guarnieri , Daniel Moghimi , Deian Stefan , Marco Vassena

Memory safety remains a critical and widely violated property in reality. Numerous defense techniques have been proposed and developed but most of them are not applied or enabled by default in production-ready environment due to their…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Wei Song , Jiameng Ying , Sihao Shen , Boya Li , Hao Ma , Peng Liu

Despite numerous countermeasures proposed by practitioners and researchers, remote control-flow alteration of programs with memory-safety vulnerabilities continues to be a realistic threat. Guaranteeing that complex software is completely…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2017-02-20 Martín Ochoa , Sebastian Banescu , Cynthia Disenfeld , Gilles Barthe , Vijay Ganesh

Existing logic-locking attacks are known to successfully decrypt functionally correct key of a locked combinational circuit. It is possible to extend these attacks to real-world Silicon-based Intellectual Properties (IPs, which are…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-02-18 Seetal Potluri , Aydin Aysu , Akash Kumar

Spectre attacks exploit speculative execution to leak sensitive information. In the last few years, a number of static side-channel detectors have been proposed to detect cache leakage in the presence of speculative execution. However,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-11-28 Ali Sahraee

Secure compilation aims to build compilation chains that preserve security properties when translating programs from a source to a target language. Recent research led to the definition of secure compilation principles that, if met,…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2019-01-17 Matteo Busi , Pierpaolo Degano , Letterio Galletta

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…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2019-02-15 Ross Mcilroy , Jaroslav Sevcik , Tobias Tebbi , Ben L. Titzer , Toon Verwaest

Transient execution attacks that exploit speculation have raised significant concerns in computer systems. Typically, branch predictors are leveraged to trigger mis-speculation in transient execution attacks. In this work, we demonstrate a…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Md Hafizul Islam Chowdhuryy , Fan Yao

Secure compilation studies compilers that generate target-level components that are as secure as their source-level counterparts. Full abstraction is the most widely-proven property when defining a secure compiler. A compiler is modular if…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2016-04-19 Marco Patrignani , Dominique Devriese , Frank Piessens

Undefined behavior in C often causes devastating security vulnerabilities. One practical mitigation is compartmentalization, which allows developers to structure large programs into mutually distrustful compartments with clearly specified…

This paper introduces Triosecuris, a formally verified defense against Spectre BTB, RSB, and PHT that combines CET-style hardware-assisted control-flow integrity with compiler-inserted speculative load hardening (SLH). Triosecuris is based…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Jonathan Baumann , Yonghyun Kim , Yan Farba , Catalin Hritcu , Julay Leatherman-Brooks

Recent secure code generation methods, using vulnerability-aware fine-tuning, prefix-tuning, and prompt optimization, claim to prevent LLMs from producing insecure code. However, their robustness under adversarial conditions remains…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Melissa Tessa , Iyiola E. Olatunji , Aicha War , Jacques Klein , Tegawendé F. Bissyandé

High-performance dynamic language implementations make heavy use of speculative optimizations to achieve speeds close to statically compiled languages. These optimizations are typically performed by a just-in-time compiler that generates…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2020-05-19 Olivier Flückiger , Gabriel Scherer , Ming-Ho Yee , Aviral Goel , Amal Ahmed , Jan Vitek

Constant-time (CT) verification tools are commonly used for detecting potential side-channel vulnerabilities in cryptographic libraries. Recently, a new class of tools, called speculative constant-time (SCT) tools, has also been used for…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Santiago Arranz-Olmos , Gilles Barthe , Lionel Blatter , Xingyu Xie , Zhiyuan Zhang