Related papers: Lost and Found in Speculation: Hybrid Speculative …
The prevalence of memory corruption bugs in the past decades resulted in numerous defenses, such as stack canaries, control flow integrity (CFI), and memory safe languages. These defenses can prevent entire classes of vulnerabilities, and…
Fuzzing is a technique of finding bugs by executing a software recurrently with a large number of abnormal inputs. Most of the existing fuzzers consider all parts of a software equally, and pay too much attention on how to improve the code…
We introduce explicit speculation, a variant of I/O speculation technique where I/O system calls can be parallelized under the guidance of explicit application code knowledge. We propose a formal abstraction -- the foreaction graph -- which…
Verification is a critical process for ensuring the correctness of modern processors. The increasing complexity of processor designs and the emergence of new instruction set architectures (ISAs) like RISC-V have created demands for more…
This paper evaluates new security threats due to the processor frontend in modern Intel processors. The root causes of the security threats are the multiple paths in the processor frontend that the micro-operations can take: through the…
Among the many software vulnerability discovery techniques available today, fuzzing has remained highly popular due to its conceptual simplicity, its low barrier to deployment, and its vast amount of empirical evidence in discovering…
Large language models incur high inference latency due to sequential autoregressive decoding. Speculative decoding alleviates this bottleneck by using a lightweight draft model to propose multiple tokens for batched verification. However,…
Hardware-level memory vulnerabilities severely threaten computing systems. However, hardware patching is inefficient or difficult postfabrication. We investigate the effectiveness of hardware fuzzing in detecting hardware memory…
Ever-increasing design complexity of System-on-Chips (SoCs) led to significant verification challenges. Unlike software, bugs in hardware design are vigorous and eternal i.e., once the hardware is fabricated, it cannot be repaired with any…
As a result of decades of research, Windows malware detection is approached through a plethora of techniques. However, there is an ongoing mismatch between academia -- which pursues an optimal performances in terms of detection rate and low…
The transient-execution attack Meltdown leaks sensitive information by transiently accessing inaccessible data during out-of-order execution. Although Meltdown is fixed in hardware for recent CPU generations, most currently-deployed CPUs…
Side-channel attacks such as Spectre that utilize speculative execution to steal application secrets pose a significant threat to modern computing systems. While program transformations can mitigate some Spectre attacks, more advanced…
The virtualization and softwarization of 5G and NextG are critical enablers of the shift to flexibility, but they also present a potential attack surface for threats. However, current security research in communication systems focuses on…
In cryptographic engineering, extensive attention has been devoted to ameliorating the performance and security of the algorithms within. Nonetheless, in the state-of-the-art, the approaches for increasing the reliability of the efficient…
High-confidence computing relies on trusted instructional set architecture, sealed kernels, and secure operating systems. Cloud computing depends on trusted systems for virtualization tasks. Branch predictions and pipelines are essential in…
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.…
Speculative decoding has become a widely adopted technique for accelerating large language model (LLM) inference by drafting multiple candidate tokens and verifying them with a target model in parallel. Its efficiency, however, critically…
RISC-V processors are becoming ubiquitous in critical applications, but their susceptibility to microarchitectural side-channel attacks is a serious concern. Detection of microarchitectural attacks in RISC-V is an emerging research topic…
With the exponential rise in the use of cloud services, smart devices, and IoT devices, advanced cyber attacks have become increasingly sophisticated and ubiquitous. Furthermore, the rapid evolution of computing architectures and memory…
Speculative decoding is a prominent technique to speed up the inference of a large target language model based on predictions of an auxiliary draft model. While effective, in application-specific settings, it often involves fine-tuning both…