Related papers: CacheSquash: Making caches speculation-aware

The recent Meltdown and Spectre attacks highlight the importance of automated verification techniques for identifying hardware security vulnerabilities. We have developed a tool for synthesizing microarchitecture-specific programs capable…

Contemporary computing employs cache hierarchy to fill the speed gap between processors and main memories. In order to optimise system performance, Last Level Caches(LLC) are shared among all the cores. Cache sharing has made them an…

Recent advancements in speculative decoding have demonstrated considerable speedup across a wide array of large language model (LLM) tasks. Speculative decoding inherently relies on sacrificing extra memory allocations to generate several…

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…

Recent attacks have broken process isolation by exploiting microarchitectural side channels that allow indirect access to shared microarchitectural state. Enclaves strengthen the process abstraction to restore isolation guarantees. We…

Spectre attacks exploit speculative execution to leak sensitive information. In the last few years, a number of static side-channel detectors have been proposed to detect cache leakage in the presence of speculative execution. However,…

Covert channel attacks represent a significant threat to system security, leveraging shared resources to clandestinely transmit information from highly secure systems, thereby violating the system's security policies. These attacks exploit…

Mainstream compilers implement different countermeasures to prevent specific classes of speculative execution attacks. Unfortunately, these countermeasures either lack formal guarantees or come with proofs restricted to speculative…

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have already achieved remarkable results on long-text tasks, but the limited GPU memory (VRAM) resources struggle to accommodate the linearly growing demand for key-value (KV) cache as the…

Micro-architectural attacks use information leaked through shared resources to break hardware-enforced isolation. These attacks have been used to steal private information ranging from cryptographic keys to privileged Operating System (OS)…

The Least-Recently Used cache replacement policy and its variants are widely deployed in modern processors. This paper shows for the first time in detail that the LRU states of caches can be used to leak information: any access to a cache…

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…

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…

Side channel attacks are a major class of attacks to crypto-systems. Attackers collect and analyze timing behavior, I/O data, or power consumption in these systems to undermine their effectiveness in protecting sensitive information. In…

Side-channel attacks on shared hardware resources increasingly threaten confidentiality, especially with the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs). In this work, we introduce Spill The Beans, a novel application of cache side-channels to…

Speculative attacks are still an active threat today that, even if initially focused on the x86 platform, reach across all modern hardware architectures. RISC-V is a newly proposed open instruction set architecture that has seen traction…

Cache timing attacks use shared caches in multi-core processors as side channels to extract information from victim processes. These attacks are particularly dangerous in cloud infrastructures, in which the deployed countermeasures cause…

Modern hardware systems are heavily underutilized when running large-scale graph applications. While many in-memory graph frameworks have made substantial progress in optimizing these applications, we show that it is still possible to…

Distributed Complex Event Processing (DCEP) is a paradigm to infer the occurrence of complex situations in the surrounding world from basic events like sensor readings. In doing so, DCEP operators detect event patterns on their incoming…

Side channel attacks steal secret keys by cleverly leveraging information leakages and can, therefore, break encryption. Thus, detection and mitigation of side channel attacks is a very important problem, but the solutions proposed in the…