Related papers: AMuLeT: Automated Design-Time Testing of Secure Sp…

Spectre attacks exploit microprocessor speculative execution to read and transmit forbidden data outside the attacker's trust domain and sandbox. Recent hardware schemes allow potentially-unsafe speculative accesses but prevent the secret's…

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…

Microarchitectural attacks represent a challenging and persistent threat to modern processors, exploiting inherent design vulnerabilities in processors to leak sensitive information or compromise systems. Of particular concern is the…

New speculation-based attacks that affect large numbers of modern systems are disclosed regularly. Currently, CPU vendors regularly fall back to heavy-handed mitigations like using barriers or enforcing strict programming guidelines…

SpecFuzz is the first tool that enables dynamic testing for speculative execution vulnerabilities (e.g., Spectre). The key is a novel concept of speculation exposure: The program is instrumented to simulate speculative execution in software…

Mainstream compilers implement different countermeasures to prevent specific classes of speculative execution attacks. Unfortunately, these countermeasures either lack formal guarantees or come with proofs restricted to speculative…

Prompt injection attacks, where untrusted data contains an injected prompt to manipulate the system, have been listed as the top security threat to LLM-integrated applications. Model-level prompt injection defenses have shown strong…

Speculative execution is a hardware optimisation technique where a processor, while waiting on the completion of a computation required for an instruction, continues to execute later instructions based on a predicted value of the pending…

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…

Speculative execution is crucial in enhancing modern processor performance but can introduce Spectre-type vulnerabilities that may leak sensitive information. Detecting Spectre gadgets from programs has been a research focus to enhance the…

Since the advent of SPECTRE, a number of countermeasures have been proposed and deployed. Rigorously reasoning about their effectiveness, however, requires a well-defined notion of security against speculative execution attacks, which has…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into real-world applications, from virtual assistants to autonomous agents. However, their flexibility also introduces new attack vectors-particularly Prompt Injection (PI), where…

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…

Speculative decoding has emerged as a promising approach to accelerate autoregressive inference in large language models (LLMs). Self-draft methods, which leverage the base LLM itself for speculation, avoid the overhead of auxiliary draft…

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…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning tasks. However, they remain highly susceptible to jailbreak attacks that undermine their safety alignment. Existing defense mechanisms typically…

Since the advent of Spectre attacks, researchers and practitioners have developed a range of hardware and software measures to counter transient execution attacks. A prime example of such mitigation is speculative load hardening in LLVM,…

As large language models (LLMs) become ubiquitous, parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods and safety-first defenses have proliferated rapidly. However, the number of approaches and their recent increase have resulted in diverse…

CPU cache is a limited but crucial storage component in modern processors, whereas the cache timing side-channel may inadvertently leak information through the physically measurable timing variance. Speculative execution, an essential…