Related papers: DeTRAP: RISC-V Return Address Protection With Debu…

Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) is a typical attack technique that exploits return addresses to abuse existing code repeatedly. Most of the current return address protecting mechanisms (also known as the Backward-Edge Control-Flow…

Microcontroller-based embedded systems are increasingly used for applications that can have serious and immediate consequences if compromised---including automobile control systems, smart locks, drones, and implantable medical devices. Due…

Control-Flow Hijacking attacks are the dominant attack vector against C/C++ programs. Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) solutions mitigate these attacks on the forward edge,i.e., indirect calls through function pointers and virtual calls.…

Many cybersecurity attacks rely on analyzing a binary executable to find exploitable sections of code. Code obfuscation is used to prevent attackers from reverse engineering these executables. In this work, we focus on control flow…

Fault-tolerant routing (FTR) in Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) has become a common practice to sustain the performance of multi-core systems with an increasing number of faults on a chip. On the other hand, usage of third-party intellectual…

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…

Control-flow attacks, usually achieved by exploiting a buffer-overflow vulnerability, have been a serious threat to system security for over fifteen years. Researchers have answered the threat with various mitigation techniques, but…

RISC-V is a promising open-source architecture primarily targeted for embedded systems. Programs compiled using the RISC-V toolchain can run bare-metal on the system, and, as such, can be vulnerable to several memory corruption…

Secret keys can be extracted from the power consumption or electromagnetic emanations of unprotected devices. Traditional counter-measures have limited scope of protection, and impose several restrictions on how sensitive data must be…

Cryptographic computations are fundamental to modern computing, ensuring data confidentiality and integrity. However, these operations are highly vulnerable to power side-channel attacks that exploit variations in power consumption to leak…

A popular run-time attack technique is to compromise the control-flow integrity of a program by modifying function return addresses on the stack. So far, shadow stacks have proven to be essential for comprehensively preventing return…

Widespread use of memory unsafe programming languages (e.g., C and C++) leaves many systems vulnerable to memory corruption attacks. A variety of defenses have been proposed to mitigate attacks that exploit memory errors to hijack the…

Stack-based memory corruption vulnerabilities have long been exploited by attackers to execute arbitrary code or perform unauthorized memory operations. Various defense mechanisms have been introduced to mitigate stack memory errors, but…

With the discovery of new exploit techniques, new protection mechanisms are needed as well. Mitigations like DEP (Data Execution Prevention) or ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) created a significantly more difficult environment for…

Memory safety in C and C++ remains largely unresolved. A technique usually called "memory tagging" may dramatically improve the situation if implemented in hardware with reasonable overhead. This paper describes two existing implementations…

Manipulations of return addresses on the stack are the basis for a variety of attacks on programs written in memory unsafe languages. Dual stack schemes for protecting return addresses promise an efficient and effective defense against such…

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…

Caches are used to reduce the speed differential between the CPU and memory to improve the performance of modern processors. However, attackers can use contention-based cache timing attacks to steal sensitive information from victim…

Recently, code reuse attacks (CRAs), such as return-oriented programming (ROP) and jump-oriented programming (JOP), have emerged as a new class of ingenious security threatens. Attackers can utilize CRAs to hijack the control flow of…

In the last decade, we have witnessed exponential growth in the complexity of control systems for safety-critical applications (automotive, robots, industrial automation) and their transition to heterogeneous mixed-criticality systems…