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With the significant development of the Internet of Things and low-cost cloud services, the sensory and data processing requirements of IoT systems are continually going up. TrustZone is a hardware-protected Trusted Execution Environment…
The recent strides in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have propelled the rise of TinyML, a paradigm enabling AI computations at the edge without dependence on cloud connections. While TinyML offers real-time data…
Modern processor advancements have introduced security risks, particularly in the form of microarchitectural timing attacks. High-profile attacks such as Meltdown and Spectre have revealed critical flaws, compromising the entire system's…
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…
Spin-Transfer Torque RAM (STTRAM) is promising for cache applications. However, it brings new data security issues that were absent in volatile memory counterparts such as Static RAM (SRAM) and embedded Dynamic RAM (eDRAM). This is…
Hardware (HW) security issues have been emerging at an alarming rate in recent years. Transient execution attacks, in particular, pose a genuine threat to the security of modern computing systems. Despite recent advances, understanding the…
On-device machine learning (ML) introduces new security concerns about model privacy. Storing valuable trained ML models on user devices exposes them to potential extraction by adversaries. The current mainstream solution for on-device…
Cache serves as a temporary data memory module in many general-purpose processors and domain-specific accelerators. Its density, power, speed, and reliability play a critical role in enhancing the overall system performance and quality of…
While memory corruption bugs stemming from the use of unsafe programming languages are an old and well-researched problem, the resulting vulnerabilities still dominate real-world exploitation today. Various mitigations have been proposed to…
A major security challenge for modern Internet of Things (IoT) deployments is to ensure that the devices run legitimate firmware free from malware. This challenge can be addressed through a security primitive called attestation which allows…
Blockchain systems, such as Ethereum, use an approach called "metering" to assign a cost to smart contract execution, an approach which is designed to incentivise miners to operate the network and protect it against DoS attacks. In the…
Temporal memory safety bugs, especially use-after-free and double free bugs, pose a major security threat to C programs. Real-world exploits utilizing these bugs enable attackers to read and write arbitrary memory locations, causing…
Speculative execution which is used pervasively in modern CPUs can leave side effects in the processor caches and other structures even when the speculated instructions do not commit and their direct effect is not visible. The recent…
As power consumption from AI training and inference continues to increase, AI accelerators are being integrated directly into the CPU. Intel's Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) is one such example, debuting on the 4th generation Intel Xeon…
Spectre, Meltdown, and related attacks have demonstrated that kernels, hypervisors, trusted execution environments, and browsers are prone to information disclosure through micro-architectural weaknesses. However, it remains unclear as to…
Large Language Models (LLMs) deployed on mobile devices offer benefits like user privacy and reduced network latency, but introduce a significant security risk: the leakage of proprietary models to end users. To mitigate this risk, we…
This paper argues and shows that speculative vectorization, where a loop with rare or unknown memory dependencies are still vectorized, is fundamentally vulnerable and cannot be mitigated by existing defenses. We implement a simple proof of…
Caches have been exploited to leak secret information due to the different times they take to handle memory accesses. Cache timing attacks include non-speculative cache side and covert channel attacks and cache-based speculative execution…
Modern computer processors use microarchitectural optimization mechanisms to improve performance. As a downside, such optimizations are prone to introducing side-channel vulnerabilities. Speculative loading of memory, called prefetching, is…
Recent development in memory technologies has introduced Spin-Transfer Torque Magnetic RAM (STT-MRAM) as the most promising replacement for SRAMs in on-chip cache memories. Besides its lower leakage power, higher density, immunity to…