Related papers: FSLH: Flexible Mechanized Speculative Load Hardeni…

Speculative execution techniques have been a cornerstone of modern processors to improve instruction-level parallelism. However, recent studies showed that this kind of techniques could be exploited by attackers to leak secret data via…

This paper argues and shows that speculative vectorization, where a loop with rare or unknown memory dependencies are still vectorized, is fundamentally vulnerable and cannot be mitigated by existing defenses. We implement a simple proof of…

Speculation is key to achieving high CPU performance, yet it enables risks like Spectre attacks which remain a significant challenge to mitigate without incurring substantial performance overheads. These attacks typically unfold in three…

This paper shows that it is possible to reason about the safety and termination of programs handling potentially cyclic, singly-linked lists using propositional reasoning even when the safety invariants and termination arguments depend on…

Spectre, Meltdown, and related attacks have demonstrated that kernels, hypervisors, trusted execution environments, and browsers are prone to information disclosure through micro-architectural weaknesses. However, it remains unclear as to…

Transient execution attacks that exploit speculation have raised significant concerns in computer systems. Typically, branch predictors are leveraged to trigger mis-speculation in transient execution attacks. In this work, we demonstrate a…

Speculative decoding is a technique that uses multiple language models to accelerate infer- ence. Previous works have used an experi- mental approach to optimize the throughput of the inference pipeline, which involves LLM training and can…

Even though recent years have seen many attacks exposing severe vulnerabilities in Federated Learning (FL), a holistic understanding of what enables these attacks and how they can be mitigated effectively is still lacking. In this work, we…

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is seeing increasing real-world deployment to protect data in use by allowing computation over encrypted data. However, the same malleability that enables homomorphic computations also raises integrity…

The recent Spectre attacks exploit speculative execution, a pervasively used feature of modern microprocessors, to allow the exfiltration of sensitive data across protection boundaries. In this paper, we introduce a new Spectre-class attack…

We present Serberus, the first comprehensive mitigation for hardening constant-time (CT) code against Spectre attacks (involving the PHT, BTB, RSB, STL and/or PSF speculation primitives) on existing hardware. Serberus is based on three…

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) allows a third party to perform arbitrary computations on encrypted data, learning neither the inputs nor the computation results. Hence, it provides resilience in situations where computations are carried…

Secure software leasing (SSL) is a quantum cryptographic primitive that enables users to execute software only during the software is leased. It prevents users from executing leased software after they return the leased software to its…

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) represents a paradigm shift in cryptography, enabling computation directly on encrypted data and unlocking privacy-critical computation. Despite being increasingly deployed in real platforms, the…

Authors of cryptographic software are well aware that their code should not leak secrets through its timing behavior, and, until 2018, they believed that following industry-standard constant-time coding guidelines was sufficient. However,…

Verification is a key bottleneck in improving inference speed while maintaining distribution fidelity in Speculative Decoding. Recent work has shown that sequence-level verification leads to a higher number of accepted tokens compared to…

The recent Spectre attacks has demonstrated the fundamental insecurity of current computer microarchitecture. The attacks use features like pipelining, out-of-order and speculation to extract arbitrary information about the memory contents…

Attacks like Spectre abuse speculative execution, one of the key performance optimizations of modern CPUs. Recently, several testing tools have emerged to automatically detect speculative leaks in commercial (black-box) CPUs. However, the…

The recent Spectre attacks have demonstrated that modern microarchitectural optimizations can make software insecure. These attacks use features like pipelining, out-of-order and speculation to extract information about the memory contents…

Recently discovered Spectre and meltdown attacks affects almost all processors by leaking confidential information to other processes through side-channel attacks. These vulnerabilities expose design flaws in the architecture of modern…