Related papers: CleanStack: A New Dual-Stack for Defending Against…

Modern computer architectures rely on caches to reduce the latency gap between the CPU and main memory. While indispensable for performance, caches pose a serious threat to security because they leak information about memory access patterns…

CPU registers are small discrete storage units, used to hold temporary data and instructions within the CPU. Registers are not addressable in the same way memory is, which makes them immune from memory attacks and manipulation by other…

The growing use of third-party hardware accelerators (e.g., FPGAs, ASICs) for deep neural networks (DNNs) introduces new security vulnerabilities. Conventional model-level backdoor attacks, which only poison a model's weights to misclassify…

Hardware caches are essential performance optimization features in modern processors to reduce the effective memory access time. Unfortunately, they are also the prime targets for attacks on computer processors because they are…

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…

Despite the remarkable progress of diffusion models in image generation, recent studies reveal their vulnerability to backdoor attacks via covert visual or textual triggers. Although evolving defense mechanisms can detect most existing…

Malware detection using Hardware Performance Counters (HPCs) offers a promising, low-overhead approach for monitoring program behavior. However, a fundamental architectural constraint, that only a limited number of hardware events can be…

As cache-based side-channel attacks become serious security problems, various defenses have been proposed and deployed in both software and hardware. Consequently, cache-based side-channel attacks on processes co-residing on the same core…

To improve the overall performance of processors, computer architects use various performance optimization techniques in modern processors, such as speculative execution, branch prediction, and chaotic execution. Both now and in the future,…

Existing dynamic vulnerability patching techniques are not well-suited for embedded devices, especially mission-critical ones such as medical equipment, as they have limited computational power and memory but uninterrupted service…

Randomized, skewed caches (RSCs) such as CEASER-S have recently received much attention to defend against contention-based cache side channels. By randomizing and regularly changing the mapping(s) of addresses to cache sets, these…

Contemporary computing employs cache hierarchy to fill the speed gap between processors and main memories. In order to optimise system performance, Last Level Caches(LLC) are shared among all the cores. Cache sharing has made them an…

The last level cache is vulnerable to timing based side channel attacks because it is shared by the attacker and the victim processes even if they are located on different cores. These timing attacks evict the victim cache lines using small…

Reliability and real-time responsiveness in safety-critical systems have traditionally been achieved using error detection mechanisms, such as LockStep, which require pre-configured checker cores,strict synchronisation between main and…

Intra-session network coding is known to be vulnerable to pollution attacks. In this work, first, we introduce a novel homomorphic MAC scheme called SpaceMac, which allows an intermediate node to verify if its received packets belong to a…

In the past decade, many vulnerabilities were discovered in microarchitectures which yielded attack vectors and motivated the study of countermeasures. Further, architectural and physical imperfections in DRAMs led to the discovery of…

Code models are increasingly adopted in software development but remain vulnerable to backdoor attacks via poisoned training data. Existing backdoor attacks on code models face a fundamental trade-off between transferability and…

In neural network (NN) security, safeguarding model integrity and resilience against adversarial attacks has become paramount. This study investigates the application of stochastic computing (SC) as a novel mechanism to fortify NN models.…

Backdoor attacks pose a significant threat to deep neural networks, particularly as recent advancements have led to increasingly subtle implantation, making the defense more challenging. Existing defense mechanisms typically rely on an…

Neural ranking models have achieved remarkable progress and are now widely deployed in real-world applications such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). However, like other neural architectures, they remain vulnerable to adversarial…