Related papers: Do You Even Lift? Strengthening Compiler Security …
We address the problem of preserving non-interference across compiler transformations under speculative semantics. We develop a proof method that ensures the preservation uniformly across all source programs. The basis of our proof method…
In the last two decades, the evolving cyber-threat landscape has brought to center stage the contentious tradeoffs between the security and performance of modern microprocessors. The guarantees provided by the hardware to ensure no…
Microarchitectural attacks exploit the abstraction gap between the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) and how instructions are actually executed by processors to compromise the confidentiality and integrity of a system. To secure systems…
Analyzing the behavior of a program running on a processor that supports speculative execution is crucial for applications such as execution time estimation and side channel detection. Unfortunately, existing static analysis techniques…
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…
Speculative attacks are still an active threat today that, even if initially focused on the x86 platform, reach across all modern hardware architectures. RISC-V is a newly proposed open instruction set architecture that has seen traction…
Computer systems often provide hardware support for isolation mechanisms like privilege levels, virtual memory, or enclaved execution. Over the past years, several successful software-based side-channel attacks have been developed that…
Large language models (LLMs) employ safety mechanisms to prevent harmful outputs, yet these defenses primarily rely on semantic pattern matching. We show that encoding harmful prompts as coherent mathematical problems -- using formalisms…
Spectre attacks exploit microprocessor speculative execution to read and transmit forbidden data outside the attacker's trust domain and sandbox. Recent hardware schemes allow potentially-unsafe speculative accesses but prevent the secret's…
Recently discovered Spectre and meltdown attacks affects almost all processors by leaking confidential information to other processes through side-channel attacks. These vulnerabilities expose design flaws in the architecture of modern…
Developing secure distributed systems is difficult, and even harder when advanced cryptography must be used to achieve security goals. Following prior work, we advocate using secure program partitioning to synthesize cryptographic…
When implementing secure software, developers must ensure certain requirements, such as the erasure of secret data after its use and execution in real time. Such requirements are not explicitly captured by the C language and could…
Defending large language models (LLMs) against jailbreak attacks is crucial for ensuring their safe deployment. Existing defense strategies typically rely on predefined static criteria to differentiate between harmful and benign prompts.…
Speculative decoding has emerged as a promising approach to accelerate autoregressive inference in large language models (LLMs). Self-draft methods, which leverage the base LLM itself for speculation, avoid the overhead of auxiliary draft…
The prevalence of memory corruption bugs in the past decades resulted in numerous defenses, such as stack canaries, control flow integrity (CFI), and memory safe languages. These defenses can prevent entire classes of vulnerabilities, and…
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"…
Whenever modern CPUs encounter a conditional branch for which the condition cannot be evaluated yet, they predict the likely branch target and speculatively execute code. Such pipelining is key to optimizing runtime performance and is…
This paper proposes RCP, a new reversible coherence protocol that ensures invisible speculative load execution (ISLE) with low overhead. RCP can be combined with processor mechanisms that eliminate the effects of speculative instructions on…
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…
Based on our previous work on truly concurrent process algebras APTC, we use it to verify the security protocols. This work (called Secure APTC, abbreviated SAPTC) have the following advantages in verifying security protocols: (1) It has a…