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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…
Probabilistic breadth-first traversals (BPTs) are used in many network science and graph machine learning applications. In this paper, we are motivated by the application of BPTs in stochastic diffusion-based graph problems such as…
One of the most prevalent source of side channel vulnerabilities is the secret-dependent behavior of conditional branches (SDBCB). The state-of-the-art solution relies on Constant-Time Expressions, which require high programming effort and…
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…
Modern processor designs use a variety of microarchitectural methods to achieve high performance. Unfortunately, new side-channels have often been uncovered that exploit these enhanced designs. One area that has received little attention…
As machine learning models become increasingly deployed across the edge of internet of things environments, a partitioned deep learning paradigm in which models are split across multiple computational nodes introduces a new dimension of…
Modern processors widely equip the Performance Monitoring Unit (PMU) to collect various architecture and microarchitecture events. Software developers often utilize the PMU to enhance program's performance, but the potential side effects…
CPU branch prediction has hit a wall--existing techniques achieve near-perfect accuracy on 99% of static branches, and yet the mispredictions that remain hide major performance gains. In a companion report, we show that a primary source of…
High-performance branch target buffers (BTBs) and the L1I cache are key to high-performance front-end. Modern branch predictors are highly accurate, but with an increase in code footprint in modern-day server workloads, BTB and L1I misses…
Graph processing is typically considered to be a memory-bound rather than compute-bound problem. One common line of thought is that more available memory bandwidth corresponds to better graph processing performance. However, in this work we…
Modern processors are highly optimized systems where every single cycle of computation time matters. Many optimizations depend on the data that is being processed. Software-based microarchitectural attacks exploit effects of these…
Speculative execution attacks leverage the speculative and out-of-order execution features in modern computer processors to access secret data or execute code that should not be executed. Secret information can then be leaked through a…
Recent research has revealed an ever-growing class of microarchitectural attacks that exploit speculative execution, a standard feature in modern processors. Proposed and deployed countermeasures involve a variety of compiler updates,…
The transient execution attack is a type of attack leveraging the vulnerability of modern CPU optimization technologies. New attacks surface rapidly. The side-channel is a key part of transient execution attacks to leak data. In this work,…
Accelerators used for machine learning (ML) inference provide great performance benefits over CPUs. Securing confidential model in inference against off-chip side-channel attacks is critical in harnessing the performance advantage in…
The complexity of modern processor architectures has given rise to sophisticated interactions among their components. Such interactions may result in potential attack vectors in terms of side channels, possibly available to user-land…
The endless stream of vulnerabilities urgently calls for principled mitigation to confine the effect of exploitation. However, the monolithic architecture of commodity OS kernels, like the Linux kernel, allows an attacker to compromise the…
Reasoning about correctness and security of software is increasingly difficult due to the complexity of modern microarchitectural features such as out-of-order execution. A class of security vulnerabilities termed Spectre that exploits side…
We present a kernel-level infrastructure that allows system-wide detection of malicious applications attempting to exploit cache-based side-channel attacks to break the process confinement enforced by standard operating systems. This…
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…