Related papers: TikTag: Breaking ARM's Memory Tagging Extension wi…
ARM recently introduced a security feature called Memory Tagging Extension or MTE, which is designed to defend against common memory safety vulnerabilities, such as buffer overflow and use after free. In this paper, we examine three aspects…
Hardware-assisted memory protection features are increasingly being deployed in COTS processors. ARMv8.5 Memory Tagging Extensions (MTE) is a recent example, which has been used to provide probabilistic checks for memory safety. This use of…
Memory safety bugs, such as buffer overflows and use-after-frees, are the leading causes of software safety issues in production. Software-based approaches, e.g., Address Sanitizer (ASAN), can detect such bugs with high precision, but with…
Memory-safety escapes continue to form the launching pad for a wide range of security attacks, especially for the substantial base of deployed software that is coded in pointer-based languages such as C/C++. Although compiler and…
Memory vulnerabilities are a major threat to many computing systems. To effectively thwart spatial and temporal memory vulnerabilities, full logical memory safety is required. However, current mitigation techniques for memory safety are…
Trusted execution environments (TEEs) provide an environment for running workloads in the cloud without having to trust cloud service providers, by offering additional hardware-assisted security guarantees. However, main memory encryption…
We present the first comprehensive analysis of ARM MTE hardware performance on four different microarchitectures: ARM Big (A7x), Little (A5x), and Performance (Cortex-X) cores on the Google Pixel 8 and Pixel 9, and on Ampere Computing's…
Speculative execution attacks leverage the speculative and out-of-order execution features in modern computer processors to access secret data or execute code that should not be executed. Secret information can then be leaked through a…
Memory safety in complex applications implemented in unsafe programming languages such as C/C++ is still an unresolved problem in practice. Many different types of defenses have been proposed in the past to mitigate this problem. The most…
Attacks on the microarchitecture of modern processors have become a practical threat to security and privacy in desktop and cloud computing. Recently, cache attacks have successfully been demonstrated on ARM based mobile devices, suggesting…
Memory safety in C and C++ remains largely unresolved. A technique usually called "memory tagging" may dramatically improve the situation if implemented in hardware with reasonable overhead. This paper describes two existing implementations…
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…
Recent work has shown that out-of-order and speculative execution mechanisms used to increase performance in the majority of processors expose the processors to critical attacks. These attacks, called Meltdown and Spectre, exploit the side…
Side-channel attacks on memory (SCAM) exploit unintended data leaks from memory subsystems to infer sensitive information, posing significant threats to system security. These attacks exploit vulnerabilities in memory access patterns, cache…
Timing-based side and covert channels in processor caches continue to be a threat to modern computers. This work shows for the first time a systematic, large-scale analysis of Arm devices and the detailed results of attacks the processors…
Transient execution attacks, also called speculative execution attacks, have drawn much interest as they exploit the transient execution of instructions, e.g., during branch prediction, to leak data. Transient execution is fundamental to…
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…
Research on transient execution attacks including Spectre and Meltdown showed that exception or branch misprediction events might leave secret-dependent traces in the CPU's microarchitectural state. This observation led to a proliferation…
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…
The transient execution attack is a type of attack leveraging the vulnerability of modern CPU optimization technologies. New attacks surface rapidly. The side-channel is a key part of transient execution attacks to leak data. In this work,…