Related papers: Lost and Found in Speculation: Hybrid Speculative …
Speculative decoding (SD) has emerged as a widely used paradigm to accelerate LLM inference without compromising quality. It works by first employing a compact model to draft multiple tokens efficiently and then using the target LLM to…
CPUs provide isolation mechanisms like virtualization and privilege levels to protect software. Yet these focus on architectural isolation while typically overlooking microarchitectural side channels, exemplified by Meltdown and Foreshadow.…
Binary-only fuzzing often struggles with achieving thorough code coverage and uncovering hidden vulnerabilities due to limited insight into a program's internal dataflows. Traditional grey-box fuzzers guide test case generation primarily…
Modern processors are highly optimized systems where every single cycle of computation time matters. Many optimizations depend on the data that is being processed. Software-based microarchitectural attacks exploit effects of these…
Modern computer scaling trends in pursuit of larger component counts and power efficiency have, unfortunately, lead to less reliable hardware and consequently soft errors escaping into application data ("silent data corruptions").…
Since the discovery of Spectre, a large number of hardware mechanisms for secure speculation has been proposed. Intuitively, more defensive mechanisms are less efficient but can securely execute a larger class of programs, while more…
Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive language model inference by verifying multiple draft tokens in parallel. However, the verification stage often becomes the dominant computational bottleneck, especially for long-context inputs…
Timing vulnerabilities in processors have emerged as a potent threat. As processors are the foundation of any computing system, identifying these flaws is imperative. Recently fuzzing techniques, traditionally used for detecting software…
A new class of vulnerabilities related to speculative and out-of-order execution, fault-injection, and microarchitectural side channels rose to attention in 2018. The techniques behind the transient execution vulnerabilities were not new,…
Fuzzing is a popular vulnerability automated testing method utilized by professionals and broader community alike. However, despite its abilities, fuzzing is a time-consuming, computationally expensive process. This is problematic for the…
Recent advancements in Mixture of Experts (MoE) models have significantly increased their parameter scale as well as model performance. Extensive offloading techniques have been proposed to address the GPU memory limitations of MoE…
The importance of preventing microarchitectural timing side channels in security-critical applications has surged in recent years. Constant-time programming has emerged as a best-practice technique for preventing the leakage of secret…
We present Harvey, an industrial greybox fuzzer for smart contracts, which are programs managing accounts on a blockchain. Greybox fuzzing is a lightweight test-generation approach that effectively detects bugs and security vulnerabilities.…
Modern out-of-order CPUs heavily rely on speculative execution for performance optimization, with branch prediction serving as a cornerstone to minimize stalls and maximize efficiency. Whenever shared branch prediction resources lack proper…
Transient execution attacks utilize micro-architectural covert channels to leak secrets that should not have been accessible during logical program execution. Commonly used micro-architectural covert channels are those that leave lasting…
Fluid Stochastic Petri Nets are used to capture the dynamic behavior of an ILP processor, and discrete-event simulation is applied to assess the performance potential of predictions and speculative execution in boosting the performance of…
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…
Flaky failure triage is crucial for keeping distributed database continuous integration (CI) efficient and reliable. After a failure is observed, operators must quickly decide whether to auto-rerun the job as likely flaky or escalate it as…
Speculative side-channel attacks access sensitive data and use transmitters to leak the data during wrong-path execution. Various defenses have been proposed to prevent such information leakage. However, not all speculatively executed…
Recently, speculative decoding (SD) has emerged as a promising technique to accelerate LLM inference by employing a small draft model to propose draft tokens in advance, and validating them in parallel with the large target model. However,…