Related papers: CacheSquash: Making caches speculation-aware
Efficient LLM inference on resource-constrained devices presents significant challenges in compute and memory utilization. Due to limited GPU memory, existing systems offload model weights to CPU memory, incurring substantial I/O overhead…
In this paper we investigate the feasibility of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks on shared caches in multicore platforms. With carefully engineered attacker tasks, we are able to cause more than 300X execution time increases on a victim task…
Modern computer architectures rely on caches to reduce the latency gap between the CPU and main memory. While indispensable for performance, caches pose a serious threat to security because they leak information about memory access patterns…
Speculative execution is crucial in enhancing modern processor performance but can introduce Spectre-type vulnerabilities that may leak sensitive information. Detecting Spectre gadgets from programs has been a research focus to enhance the…
Timing channels in cache hierarchies are an important enabler in many microarchitectural attacks. ScatterCache (USENIX 2019) is a protected cache architecture that randomizes the address-to-index mapping with a keyed cryptographic function,…
Cache prefetcher greatly eliminates compulsory cache misses, by fetching data from slower memory to faster cache before it is actually required by processors. Sophisticated prefetchers predict next use cache line by repeating program's…
Covert channels can be utilized to secretly deliver information from high privileged processes to low privileged processes in the context of a high-assurance computing system. In this case study, we investigate the possibility of covert…
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…
Website fingerprinting attacks, which use statistical analysis on network traffic to compromise user privacy, have been shown to be effective even if the traffic is sent over anonymity-preserving networks such as Tor. The classical attack…
Out-of-order execution and speculative execution are among the biggest contributors to performance and efficiency of modern processors. However, they are inconsiderate, leaking secret data during the transient execution of instructions.…
Side-channel attacks consist of retrieving internal data from a victim system by analyzing its leakage, which usually requires proximity to the victim in the range of a few millimetres. Screaming channels are EM side channels transmitted at…
Over the last two decades, the danger of sharing resources between programs has been repeatedly highlighted. Multiple side-channel attacks, which seek to exploit shared components for leaking information, have been devised, mostly targeting…
Transient execution attacks have been one of the widely explored microarchitectural side channels since the discovery of Spectre and Meltdown. However, much of the research has been driven by manual discovery of new transient paths through…
A new framework for information hiding security, called chaos-security, has been proposed in a previous study. It is based on the evaluation of unpredictability of the scheme, whereas existing notions of security, as stego-security, are…
Modern SoCs integrate multiple CPU cores and Hardware Accelerators (HWAs) that share the same main memory system, causing interference among memory requests from different agents. The result of this interference, if not controlled well, is…
We provide a queueing-theoretic framework for job replication schemes based on the principle "\emph{replicate a job as soon as the system detects it as a \emph{straggler}}". This is called job \emph{speculation}. Recent works have analyzed…
Multi-process concurrency is effective in improving program efficiency and maximizing CPU utilization. The correct execution of concurrency is ensured by the mutual exclusion and synchronization mechanism (MESM) that manages the shared…
Intel SGX is known to be vulnerable to a class of practical attacks exploiting memory access pattern side-channels, notably page-fault attacks and cache timing attacks. A promising hardening scheme is to wrap applications in hardware…
Randomized, skewed caches (RSCs) such as CEASER-S have recently received much attention to defend against contention-based cache side channels. By randomizing and regularly changing the mapping(s) of addresses to cache sets, these…
We analyze quantitatively several strategies for better utilization of the {\em cache} or the {\em {fast access}} memory in computers. We define a performance factor $\alpha$ that denotes the fraction of the cache area utilized when the…