Related papers: I Know What You Sync: Covert and Side Channel Atta…
Cache side-channel attacks extract secrets by examining how victim software accesses cache. To date, practical attacks on cryptosystems and media libraries are demonstrated under different scenarios, inferring secret keys and reconstructing…
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…
We present a taxonomy and an algebra for attack patterns on component-based operating systems. In a multilevel security scenario, where isolation of partitions containing data at different security classifications is the primary security…
Side-channel attacks on mobile devices have gained increasing attention since their introduction in 2007. While traditional side-channel attacks, such as power analysis attacks and electromagnetic analysis attacks, required physical…
Passive operating system fingerprinting reveals valuable information to the defenders of heterogeneous private networks; at the same time, attackers can use fingerprinting to reconnoiter networks, so defenders need obfuscation techniques to…
Timing side channels have been used to extract cryptographic keys and sensitive documents, even from trusted enclaves. In this paper, we focus on cache side channels created by access to shared code or data in the memory hierarchy. This…
The massive trend toward embedded systems introduces new security threats to prevent. Malicious firmware makes it easier to launch cyberattacks against embedded systems. Systems infected with malicious firmware maintain the appearance of…
Today's mobile devices contain densely packaged system-on-chips (SoCs) with multi-core, high-frequency CPUs and complex pipelines. In parallel, sophisticated SoC-assisted security mechanisms have become commonplace for protecting device…
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…
In the last years, a series of side channels have been discovered on CPUs. These side channels have been used in powerful attacks, e.g., on cryptographic implementations, or as building blocks in transient-execution attacks such as Spectre…
Modern computer processors use microarchitectural optimization mechanisms to improve performance. As a downside, such optimizations are prone to introducing side-channel vulnerabilities. Speculative loading of memory, called prefetching, is…
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…
New hardware primitives such as Intel SGX secure a user-level process in presence of an untrusted or compromised OS. Such "enclaved execution" systems are vulnerable to several side-channels, one of which is the page fault channel. In this…
Information leaks through side channels are a pervasive problem, even in security-critical applications. Functional side channels arise when an attacker knows that a secret value of a server stays fixed for a certain time. Then, the…
Modern x86 processors have many prefetch instructions that can be used by programmers to boost performance. However, these instructions may also cause security problems. In particular, we found that on Intel processors, there are two…
Timing channels are information flows, encoded in the relative timing of events, that bypass the system's protection mechanisms. Any microarchitectural state that depends on execution history and affects the rate of progress of later…
We present a novel mechanism to construct a covert channel based on page faults. A page fault is an event that occurs when a process or a thread tries to access a page of memory that is not currently mapped to its address space. The kernel…
Cybersecurity continues to be a difficult issue for society especially as the number of networked systems grows. Techniques to protect these systems range from rules-based to artificial intelligence-based intrusion detection systems and…
To meet the ever-growing need for performance in silicon devices, SoC providers have been increasingly relying on software-hardware cooperation. By controlling hardware resources such as power or clock management from the software,…
Side-channel attacks on memory (SCAM) exploit unintended data leaks from memory subsystems to infer sensitive information, posing significant threats to system security. These attacks exploit vulnerabilities in memory access patterns, cache…