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The Spectre speculative side-channel attacks pose formidable threats for security. Research has shown that code following the cryptographic constant-time discipline can be efficiently protected against Spectre v1 using a selective variant…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Jonathan Baumann , Roberto Blanco , Léon Ducruet , Sebastian Harwig , Catalin Hritcu

Recent years have seen an increasing emphasis on information security, and various encryption methods have been proposed. However, for symmetric encryption methods, the well-known encryption techniques still rely on the key space to…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-03-12 Xiang Li , Peng Wang

Practical attacks that exploit speculative execution can leak confidential information via microarchitectural side channels. The recently-demonstrated Spectre attacks leverage speculative loads which circumvent access checks to read…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-07-11 Vladimir Kiriansky , Carl Waldspurger

Speculative execution enhances processor performance by predicting intermediate results and executing instructions based on these predictions. However, incorrect predictions can lead to security vulnerabilities, as speculative instructions…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Xaver Fabian , Marco Guarnieri , Boris Köpf , Jose F. Morales , Marco Patrignani , Jan Reineke , Andres Sanchez

We propose ProSpeCT, a generic formal processor model providing provably secure speculation for the constant-time policy. For constant-time programs under a non-speculative semantics, ProSpeCT guarantees that speculative and out-of-order…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-08-14 Lesly-Ann Daniel , Marton Bognar , Job Noorman , Sébastien Bardin , Tamara Rezk , Frank Piessens

Trusted execution environments (TEEs) provide an environment for running workloads in the cloud without having to trust cloud service providers, by offering additional hardware-assisted security guarantees. However, main memory encryption…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-09-25 Jan Wichelmann , Anna Pätschke , Luca Wilke , Thomas Eisenbarth

The Spectre vulnerability in modern processors has been widely reported. The key insight in this vulnerability is that speculative execution in processors can be misused to access the secrets. Subsequently, even though the speculatively…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-11-13 Guanhua Wang , Sudipta Chattopadhyay , Ivan Gotovchits , Tulika Mitra , Abhik Roychoudhury

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-07-20 Hamed Nemati , Roberto Guanciale , Pablo Buiras , Andreas Lindner

We propose a new formal criterion for secure compilation, providing strong security guarantees for components written in unsafe, low-level languages with C-style undefined behavior. Our criterion goes beyond recent proposals, which protect…

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-02-03 Guangyuan Hu , Zecheng He , Ruby Lee

We give a public key encryption scheme with plausible quasi-exponential security based on the conjectured intractability of two constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs), both of which are instantiated with a corruption rate of $1 - o(1)$.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Isaac M Hair , Amit Sahai

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-01-19 Oleksii Oleksenko , Marco Guarnieri , Boris Köpf , Mark Silberstein

Trusted execution environments (TEEs) offer hardware-assisted means to protect code and data. However, as shown in numerous results over the years, attackers can use side-channels to leak data access patterns and even single-step the code.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Jan Wichelmann , Anja Rabich , Anna P"atschke , Thomas Eisenbarth

Out-of-order execution and speculative execution are among the biggest contributors to performance and efficiency of modern processors. However, they are inconsiderate, leaking secret data during the transient execution of instructions.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-05-23 Michael Schwarz , Robert Schilling , Florian Kargl , Moritz Lipp , Claudio Canella , Daniel Gruss

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-09-12 Nicholas Mosier , Hamed Nemati , John C. Mitchell , Caroline Trippel

New hardware primitives such as Intel SGX secure a user-level process in presence of an untrusted or compromised OS. Such "enclaved execution" systems are vulnerable to several side-channels, one of which is the page fault channel. In this…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2016-01-13 Shweta Shinde , Zheng Leong Chua , Viswesh Narayanan , Prateek Saxena

Irregular codes are bottlenecked by memory and communication latency. Decoupled access/execute (DAE) is a common technique to tackle this problem. It relies on the compiler to separate memory address generation from the rest of the program,…

Performance · Computer Science 2025-01-24 Robert Szafarczyk , Syed Waqar Nabi , Wim Vanderbauwhede

Platforms are nowadays typically equipped with tristed execution environments (TEES), such as Intel SGX and ARM TrustZone. However, recent microarchitectural attacks on TEEs repeatedly broke their confidentiality guarantees, including the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-06-07 Dhiman Chakraborty , Michael Schwarz , Sven Bugiel

Side-channel attacks impose a serious threat to cryptographic algorithms, including widely employed ones, such as AES and RSA. These attacks take advantage of the algorithm implementation in hardware or software to extract secret…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Rodothea Myrsini Tsoupidi , Roberto Castañeda Lozano , Elena Troubitsyna , Panagiotis Papadimitratos

Intel SGX (Software Guard Extension) is a promising TEE (trusted execution environment) technique that can protect programs running in user space from being maliciously accessed by the host operating system. Although it provides hardware…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-08-24 Yang Chen , Jianfeng Jiang , Shoumeng Yan , Hui Xu