Related papers: Yet Another Mirage of Breaking MIRAGE: Debunking O…
Shared processor caches are vulnerable to conflict-based side-channel attacks, where an attacker can monitor access patterns of a victim by evicting victim cache lines using cache-set conflicts. Recent mitigations propose randomized mapping…
In the main text published at USENIX Security 2025, we presented a systematic analysis of the role of cache occupancy in the design considerations for randomized caches (from the perspectives of performance and security). On the performance…
In this paper, we analyse the results and claims presented in the paper \emph{`Are Randomized Caches Truly Random? Formal Analysis of Randomized Partitioned Caches'}, presented at HPCA conference 2023. In addition, we also analyse the…
The HPCA-2023 paper "Are Randomized Caches Truly Random?" makes the claim that "MIRAGE is broken" while relying on two faulty assumptions: (1) starting from a severely compromised initial state where some sets are already full, and (2) a…
Randomizing the address-to-set mapping and partitioning of the cache has been shown to be an effective mechanism in designing secured caches. Several designs have been proposed on a variety of rationales: (1) randomized design, (2)…
Consider a set-associative cache with $p^n$ sets and $p^n$ ways where $p$ is prime and $n>0$. Furthermore, assume that the cache may be shared among $p^n$ mutually distrusting principals that may use the Prime+Probe side-channel attack…
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems enhance LLMs with external knowledge but introduce a critical attack surface: corpus poisoning. While recent studies have demonstrated the potential of such attacks, they typically rely on…
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…
Timing channels in cache hierarchies are an important enabler in many microarchitectural attacks. ScatterCache (USENIX 2019) is a protected cache architecture that randomizes the address-to-index mapping with a keyed cryptographic function,…
Microarchitectural side channel attacks have been very prominent in security research over the last few years. Caches have been an outstanding covert channel, as they provide high resolution and generic cross-core leakage even with simple…
Side-channel information leakage is a known limitation of SGX. Researchers have demonstrated that secret-dependent information can be extracted from enclave execution through page-fault access patterns. Consequently, various recent research…
Cache randomization has recently been revived as a promising defense against conflict-based cache side-channel attacks. As two of the latest implementations, CEASER-S and ScatterCache both claim to thwart conflict-based cache side-channel…
Quantum key distribution is often regarded as an unconditionally secure method to exchange a secret key by harnessing fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics. Despite the robustness of key exchange, classical post-processing reveals…
In modern computing environments, hardware resources are commonly shared, and parallel computation is widely used. Parallel tasks can cause privacy and security problems if proper isolation is not enforced. Intel proposed SGX to create a…
Caches on the modern commodity CPUs have become one of the major sources of side-channel leakages and been abused as a new attack vector. To thwart the cache-based side-channel attacks, two types of countermeasures have been proposed:…
Recent Searchable Symmetric Encryption (SSE) schemes enable secure searching over an encrypted database stored in a server while limiting the information leaked to the server. These schemes focus on hiding the access pattern, which refers…
Caches have become the prime method for unintended information extraction across logical isolation boundaries. Even Spectre and Meltdown rely on the cache side channel, as it provides great resolution and is widely available on all major…
Autonomous vehicles depend on online HD map construction to perceive lane boundaries, dividers, and pedestrian crossings -- safety-critical road elements that directly govern motion planning. While existing pixel perturbation attacks can…
Large reasoning models (LRMs) have shown significant progress in test-time scaling through chain-of-thought prompting. Current approaches like search-o1 integrate retrieval augmented generation (RAG) into multi-step reasoning processes but…
Spectre attacks disclosed in early 2018 expose data leakage scenarios via cache side channels. Specifically, speculatively executed paths due to branch mis-prediction may bring secret data into the cache which are then exposed via cache…