Related papers: On Kernel's Safety in the Spectre Era (Extended Ve…

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…

Quantum random access memory (QRAM) is required for numerous quantum algorithms and network architectures. Previous work has shown that the ubiquitous bucket-brigade QRAM is highly resilient to arbitrary local incoherent noise channels…

Monolithic operating systems, where all kernel functionality resides in a single, shared address space, are the foundation of most mainstream computer systems. However, a single flaw, even in a non-essential part of the kernel (e.g., device…

The paper presents a novel learning-based sampling strategy that guarantees rejection-free sampling of the free space under both biased and approximately uniform conditions, leveraging multivariate kernel densities. Historical data from a…

Randomizing the address-to-set mapping and partitioning of the cache has been shown to be an effective mechanism in designing secured caches. Several designs have been proposed on a variety of rationales: (1) randomized design, (2)…

Recent security vulnerabilities that target speculative execution (e.g., Spectre) present a significant challenge for processor design. The highly publicized vulnerability uses speculative execution to learn victim secrets by changing cache…

The recent Spectre attacks has demonstrated the fundamental insecurity of current computer microarchitecture. The attacks use features like pipelining, out-of-order and speculation to extract arbitrary information about the memory contents…

In this paper, we investigate how constraints on the randomization in the encoding process affect the secrecy rates achievable over wiretap channels. In particular, we characterize the secrecy capacity with a rate-limited local source of…

The recent Spectre attacks have demonstrated that modern microarchitectural optimizations can make software insecure. These attacks use features like pipelining, out-of-order and speculation to extract information about the memory contents…

While address space layout randomization (ASLR) has been extensively studied for user-space programs, the corresponding OS kernel's KASLR support remains very limited, making the kernel vulnerable to just-in-time (JIT) return-oriented…

The generalization performance of kernel methods is largely determined by the kernel, but common kernels are stationary thus input-independent and output-independent, that limits their applications on complicated tasks. In this paper, we…

Assertions are a classical and typical software development technique. These are extensively used also in operating systems and their kernels, including the Linux kernel. The paper fills a gap in existing knowledge by empirically examining…

In the main text published at USENIX Security 2025, we presented a systematic analysis of the role of cache occupancy in the design considerations for randomized caches (from the perspectives of performance and security). On the performance…

Meltdown and Spectre exploit microarchitectural changes the CPU makes during transient out-of-order execution. Using side-channel techniques, these attacks enable leaking arbitrary data from memory. As state-of-the-art software mitigations…

Performance-enhancing mechanisms such as branch prediction, out-of-order execution, and return stack buffer (RSB) have been widely employed in today's modern processing units. Although successful in increasing the CPU performance,…

The kernel is the most safety- and security-critical component of many computer systems, as the most severe bugs lead to complete system crash or exploit. It is thus desirable to guarantee that a kernel is free from these bugs using formal…

The vulnerability of neural network classifiers to adversarial attacks is a major obstacle to their deployment in safety-critical applications. Regularization of network parameters during training can be used to improve adversarial…

Heap layout randomization renders a good portion of heap vulnerabilities unexploitable. However, some remnants of the vulnerabilities are still exploitable even under the randomized layout. According to our analysis, such heap exploits…

The Spectre speculative side-channel attacks pose formidable threats for security. Research has shown that code following the cryptographic constant-time discipline can be efficiently protected against Spectre v1 using a selective variant…

Speculative execution is an optimization technique that has been part of CPUs for over a decade. It predicts the outcome and target of branch instructions to avoid stalling the execution pipeline. However, until recently, the security…