Related papers: CacheSquash: Making caches speculation-aware

Flushing the cache, using instructions like clflush and wbinvd, is commonly proposed as a countermeasure against access-based cache attacks. In this report, we show that several Intel caches, specifically the L1 caches in some pre-Skylake…

The IP-stride prefetcher has recently been exploited to leak secrets through side-channel attacks. It, however, cannot be simply disabled for security with prefetching speedup as a sacrifice. The state-of-the-art defense tries to retain the…

Data intensive applications on clusters often require requests quickly be sent to the node managing the desired data. In many applications, one must look through a sorted tree structure to determine the responsible node for accessing or…

In modern computer systems, user processes are isolated from each other by the operating system and the hardware. Additionally, in a cloud scenario it is crucial that the hypervisor isolates tenants from other tenants that are co-located on…

Deployed large language models (LLMs) often rely on speculative decoding, a technique that generates and verifies multiple candidate tokens in parallel, to improve throughput and latency. In this work, we reveal a new side-channel whereby…

NVIDIA GPUs with GDDR memories have been shown susceptible to Rowhammer-based bit-flips, similar to CPUs. However, Rowhammer exploits on GPUs have been limited to injecting untargeted bit-flips in victim data like weights of machine…

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models enable sparse expert activation, meaning that only a subset of the model's parameters is used during each inference. However, to translate this sparsity into practical performance, an expert caching mechanism…

Modern processors dynamically control their operating frequency to optimize resource utilization, maximize energy savings, and conform to system-defined constraints. If, during the execution of a software workload, the running average of…

This paper presents the Neural Cache architecture, which re-purposes cache structures to transform them into massively parallel compute units capable of running inferences for Deep Neural Networks. Techniques to do in-situ arithmetic in…

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)…

Since the advent of SPECTRE, a number of countermeasures have been proposed and deployed. Rigorously reasoning about their effectiveness, however, requires a well-defined notion of security against speculative execution attacks, which has…

To improve efficiency, nearly all parallel processing units (CPUs and GPUs) implement relaxed memory models in which memory operations may be re-ordered, i.e., executed out-of-order. Prior testing work in this area found that memory…

Since Spectre and Meltdown's disclosure in 2018, a new category of attacks has been identified and characterized by the scientific community. The Foreshadow attack, which was the first one to target Intel's secure enclave technology (namely…

LLM serving platforms are increasingly deployed as multi-model cloud systems, where user demand is often long-tailed: a few popular large models receive most requests, while many smaller tail models remain underutilized. We propose…

OS-based page sharing is a commonly used optimization in modern systems to reduce memory footprint. Unfortunately, such sharing can cause Flush+Reload cache attacks, whereby a spy periodically flushes a cache line of shared data (using the…

The last decades have seen a surge of interests in distributed computing thanks to advances in clustered computing and big data technology. Existing distributed algorithms typically assume {\it all the data are already in one place}, and…

The run-time electromagnetic (EM) emanation of microprocessors presents a side-channel that leaks the confidentiality of the applications running on them. Many recent works have demonstrated successful attacks leveraging such side-channels…

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) were once used solely for graphical computation tasks but with the increase in the use of machine learning applications, the use of GPUs to perform general-purpose computing has increased in the last few…

In this work, we propose a novel framework to identify and mitigate a recently disclosed covert channel scheme exploiting unprotected broadcast messages in cellular MAC layer protocols. Examples of covert channel are used in data…

The increasing sophistication of modern cyber threats, particularly file-less malware relying on living-off-the-land techniques, poses significant challenges to traditional detection mechanisms. Memory forensics has emerged as a crucial…