Related papers: Securing Cryptographic Software via Typed Assembly…

Out-of-order speculation, a technique ubiquitous since the early 1990s, remains a fundamental security flaw. Via attacks such as Spectre and Meltdown, an attacker can trick a victim, in an otherwise entirely correct program, into leaking…

Web services security specifications are typically expressed as a mixture of XML schemas, example messages, and narrative explanations. We propose a new specification language for writing complementary machine-checkable descriptions of…

Code obfuscation is a popular approach to turn program comprehension and analysis harder, with the aim of mitigating threats related to malicious reverse engineering and code tampering. However, programming languages that compile to high…

Deployed large language models (LLMs) often rely on speculative decoding, a technique that generates and verifies multiple candidate tokens in parallel, to improve throughput and latency. In this work, we reveal a new side-channel whereby…

This paper tackles the problem of designing efficient binary-level verification for a subset of information flow properties encompassing constant-time and secret-erasure. These properties are crucial for cryptographic implementations, but…

With the growing popularity of LLMs among the general public users, privacy-preserving and adversarial robustness have become two pressing demands for LLM-based services, which have largely been pursued separately but rarely jointly. In…

Spectre intrusions exploit speculative execution design vulnerabilities in modern processors. The attacks violate the principles of isolation in programs to gain unauthorized private user information. Current state-of-the-art detection…

The severity of recent vulnerabilities discovered on modern CPUs, e.g., Spectre [1], highlights how information leakage can have devas-tating effects to the security of computer systems. At the same time, it suggests that confidentiality…

Side-channel attacks, which are capable of breaking secrecy via side-channel information, pose a growing threat to the implementation of cryptographic algorithms. Masking is an effective countermeasure against side-channel attacks by…

ARM Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) is a new hardware feature introduced in ARMv8.5-A architecture, aiming to detect memory corruption vulnerabilities. The low overhead of MTE makes it an attractive solution to mitigate memory corruption…

Proving secure compilation of partial programs typically requires back-translating an attack against the compiled program to an attack against the source program. To prove back-translation, one can syntactically translate the target…

Secure by Design has become the mainstream development approach ensuring that software systems are not vulnerable to cyberattacks. Architectural security controls need to be carefully monitored over the software development life cycle to…

Hardware-enclaves that target complex CPU designs compromise both security and performance. Programs have little control over micro-architecture, which leads to side-channel leaks, and then have to be transformed to have worst-case control-…

While transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) theoretically support massive context windows, they suffer from severe performance degradation when processing long numerical sequences. We attribute this failure to the attention…

Recent discovery of security attacks in advanced processors, known as Spectre and Meltdown, has resulted in high public alertness about security of hardware. The root cause of these attacks is information leakage across "covert channels"…

Spectre v1 attacks pose a substantial threat to security-critical software, particularly cryptographic implementations. Existing software mitigations, however, often introduce excessive overhead by indiscriminately hardening instructions…

Backdoor learning has become an emerging research area towards building a trustworthy machine learning system. While a lot of works have studied the hidden danger of backdoor attacks in image or text classification, there is a limited…

Transient execution attacks, also called speculative execution attacks, have drawn much interest as they exploit the transient execution of instructions, e.g., during branch prediction, to leak data. Transient execution is fundamental to…

Tool calling has greatly expanded the practical utility of large language models (LLMs) by enabling them to interact with external applications. As LLM capabilities advance, effective tool use increasingly involves multi-step, multi-turn…

Spectre v1 attacks, which exploit conditional branch misprediction, are often identified with attacks that bypass array bounds checking to leak data from a victim's memory. Generally, however, Spectre v1 attacks can exploit any conditional…