Related papers: TikTag: Breaking ARM's Memory Tagging Extension wi…

Despite decades of efforts to resolve, memory safety violations are still persistent and problematic in modern systems. Various defense mechanisms have been proposed, but their deployment in real systems remains challenging because of…

Modern processors widely equip the Performance Monitoring Unit (PMU) to collect various architecture and microarchitecture events. Software developers often utilize the PMU to enhance program's performance, but the potential side effects…

In the last 10 years, cache attacks on Intel x86 CPUs have gained increasing attention among the scientific community and powerful techniques to exploit cache side channels have been developed. However, modern smartphones use one or more…

Modern DRAM modules are often equipped with hardware error correction capabilities, especially for DRAM deployed in large-scale data centers, as process technology scaling has increased the susceptibility of these devices to errors. To…

Shared processor caches are vulnerable to conflict-based side-channel attacks, where an attacker can monitor access patterns of a victim by evicting victim cache lines using cache-set conflicts. Recent mitigations propose randomized mapping…

Run-time attacks against programs written in memory-unsafe programming languages (e.g., C and C++) remain a prominent threat against computer systems. The prevalence of techniques like return-oriented programming (ROP) in attacking…

This paper presents a system combining symbolic execution (KLEE) with a 4-agent multi-LLM architecture for detecting memory vulnerabilities in Rust unsafe code. A central challenge we address is the incomplete-code problem: CVE database…

Double-fetch bugs are a special type of race condition, where an unprivileged execution thread is able to change a memory location between the time-of-check and time-of-use of a privileged execution thread. If an unprivileged attacker…

This paper investigates bandwidth-efficient DRAM caching for hybrid DRAM + 3D-XPoint memories. 3D-XPoint is becoming a viable alternative to DRAM as it enables high-capacity and non-volatile main memory systems; however, 3D-XPoint has 4-8x…

CPU cache is a limited but crucial storage component in modern processors, whereas the cache timing side-channel may inadvertently leak information through the physically measurable timing variance. Speculative execution, an essential…

On-device agents on smartphones increasingly require continuously evolving memory to support personalized, context-aware, and long-term behaviors. To meet both privacy and responsiveness demands, user data is embedded as vectors and stored…

Cache side channel attacks are increasingly alarming in modern processors due to the recent emergence of Spectre and Meltdown attacks. A typical attack performs intentional cache access and manipulates cache states to leak secrets by…

Smartphones and tablets have become prime targets for malware, due to the valuable private and corporate information they hold. While Anti-Virus (AV) program may successfully detect malicious applications (apps), they remain ineffective…

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…

In this work we present the Secure Machine, SeM for short, a CPU architecture extension for secure computing. SeM uses a small amount of in-chip additional hardware that monitors key communication channels inside the CPU chip, and only acts…

The need for secure and private Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) on edge and mobile devices has increased the necessity of protecting the architecture of these systems from threats to both security and privacy. With an…

Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) systems, which enable machine learning inference on highly resource-constrained devices, are transforming edge computing but encounter unique security challenges. These devices, restricted by RAM and CPU…

Associative cache memory significantly influences processor performance and energy consumption. Because it occupies over half of the chip area, cache memory is highly susceptible to transient and permanent faults, posing reliability…

We propose using reinforcement learning to address the challenges of discovering microarchitectural vulnerabilities, such as Spectre and Meltdown, which exploit subtle interactions in modern processors. Traditional methods like random…

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…