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The "eternal war in cache" has reached browsers, with multiple cache-based side-channel attacks and countermeasures being suggested. A common approach for countermeasures is to disable or restrict JavaScript features deemed essential for…

Side-channel attacks have become a severe threat to the confidentiality of computer applications and systems. One popular type of such attacks is the microarchitectural attack, where the adversary exploits the hardware features to break the…

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 multi-core processors share cache resources for maximum cache utilization and performance gains. However, this leaves the cache vulnerable to side-channel attacks, where timing differences in shared cache behavior are exploited to…

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…

The complexity of modern processor architectures has given rise to sophisticated interactions among their components. Such interactions may result in potential attack vectors in terms of side channels, possibly available to user-land…

We demonstrate the presence of a novel scheduler side-channel in preemptive, fixed-priority real-time systems (RTS); examples of such systems can be found in automotive systems, avionic systems, power plants and industrial control systems…

We present a new hardware-agnostic side-channel attack that targets one of the most fundamental software caches in modern computer systems: the operating system page cache. The page cache is a pure software cache that contains all…

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…

The growing memory footprints of cloud and big data applications mean that data center CPUs can spend significant time waiting for memory. An attractive approach to improving performance in such centralized compute settings is to employ…

We introduce a new timing side-channel attack on Intel CPU processors. Our Frontal attack exploits timing differences that arise from how the CPU frontend fetches and processes instructions while being interrupted. In particular, we observe…

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…

Cyber attacks and malware are now more prevalent than ever and the trend is ever upward. There have been several approaches to attack detection including resident software applications at the root or user level, e.g., virus detection, and…

Speculative execution which is used pervasively in modern CPUs can leave side effects in the processor caches and other structures even when the speculated instructions do not commit and their direct effect is not visible. The recent…

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…

DRAM chips are vulnerable to read disturbance phenomena (e.g., RowHammer and RowPress), where repeatedly accessing or keeping open a DRAM row causes bitflips in nearby rows. Attackers leverage RowHammer bitflips in real systems to take over…

Side-channel attacks on microprocessors, like the RISC-V, exhibit security vulnerabilities that lead to several design challenges. Hence, it is imperative to study and analyze these security vulnerabilities comprehensively. In this paper,…

Caches are widely used to improve performance in modern processors. By carefully evicting cache lines and identifying cache hit/miss time, contention-based cache timing channel attacks can be orchestrated to leak information from the victim…

GPUs are increasingly being used in security applications, especially for accelerating encryption/decryption. While GPUs are an attractive platform in terms of performance, the security of these devices raises a number of concerns. One…

Cache attacks pose a threat to any code whose execution flow or memory accesses depend on sensitive information. Especially in public clouds, where caches are shared across several tenants, cache attacks remain an unsolved problem. Cache…