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FPGA-based hardware accelerators are becoming increasingly popular due to their versatility, customizability, energy efficiency, constant latency, and scalability. FPGAs can be tailored to specific algorithms, enabling efficient hardware…
Performance Monitor Unit (PMU) is a significant hardware module on the current processors, which counts the events launched by processor into a set of PMU counters. Ideally, the events triggered by instructions that are executed but the…
This article presents a hardware-based memory isolation solution for constrained devices. Existing solutions target high-end embedded systems (typically ARM Cortex-A with a Memory Management Unit, MMU) such as seL4 or Pip (formally verified…
With the rapid increase in software exploits, the last few decades have seen several hardware-level features to enhance security (e.g., Intel MPX, ARM TrustZone, Intel SGX, Intel CET). Due to security, performance and/or usability issues…
Almost all modern hardware, from phone SoCs to high-end servers with accelerators, contain memory translation and protection hardware like IOMMUs, firewalls, and lookup tables which make it impossible to reason about, and enforce protection…
Apart from the actual CPU, modern server motherboards contain other auxiliary components, for example voltage regulators for power management. Those are connected to the CPU and the separate Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) via the…
Intel memory protection keys (MPK) is a new hardware feature to support thread-local permission control on groups of pages without requiring modification of page tables. Unfortunately, its current hardware implementation and software…
Intel SGX and hypervisors isolate non-privileged programs from other software, ensuring confidentiality and integrity. However, side-channel attacks continue to threaten Intel SGX's security, enabling malicious OS to manipulate PTE present…
Adversaries with physical access to a target platform can perform cold boot or DMA attacks to extract sensitive data from the RAM. In response, several main-memory encryption schemes have been proposed to prevent such attacks. Also hardware…
The development process of microcontroller firmware often involves multiple parties. In such a scenario, the Intellectual Property (IP) is not protected against adversarial developers which have unrestricted access to the firmware binary.…
Modern malware and spyware platforms attack existing antivirus solutions and even Microsoft PatchGuard. To protect users and business systems new technologies developed by Intel and AMD CPUs may be applied. To deal with the new malware we…
Performance Monitoring Unit (PMU) is a common hardware module in Intel CPUs. It can be used to record various CPU behaviors therefore it is often used for performance analysis and optimization. Of the 65536 event spaces, Intel has…
Trusted Execution Environments, such as Intel SGX, use hardware supports to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of applications against a compromised cloud system. However, side channels like access patterns remain for adversaries to…
Memory corruption attacks (MCAs) refer to malicious behaviors of system intruders that modify the contents of a memory location to disrupt the normal operation of computing systems, causing leakage of sensitive data or perturbations to…
Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX) introduced new instructions to switch the processor to enclave mode which protects it from introspection. While the enclave mode strongly protects the memory and the state of the processor, it cannot…
Fault-injection attacks have been proven in the past to be a reliable way of bypassing hardware-based security measures, such as cryptographic hashes, privilege and access permission enforcement, and trusted execution environments. However,…
Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) provides a trusted execution environment (TEE) to run code and operate sensitive data. SGX provides runtime hardware protection where both code and data are protected even if other code components are…
Memory-safety violations are a prevalent cause of both reliability and security vulnerabilities in systems software written in unsafe languages like C/C++. Unfortunately, all the existing software-based solutions to this problem exhibit…
The Replay Protected Memory Block (RPMB) in modern storage systems provides a secure area where data integrity is ensured by authentication. This block is used in digital devices to store pivotal information that must be safeguarded against…
We introduce a new timing side-channel attack on Intel CPU processors. Our Frontal attack exploits timing differences that arise from how the CPU frontend fetches and processes instructions while being interrupted. In particular, we observe…