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Related papers: Exploiting Page Faults for Covert Communication

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We introduce IMPACT, a set of high-throughput main memory-based timing attacks that leverage characteristics of processing-in-memory (PiM) architectures to establish covert and side channels. IMPACT enables high-throughput communication and…

A Covert Channel (CC) exploits legitimate communication mechanisms to stealthily transmit information, often bypassing traditional security controls. Among these, a novel paradigm called History Covert Channels (HCC) leverages past network…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Christoph Weissenborn , Steffen Wendzel

Context switching is utilized by operating systems to change the execution context between application programs. It involves saving and restoring the states of multiple registers and performing a pipeline flush to remove any pre-fetched…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Sahan Sanjaya , Aruna Jayasena , Prabhat Mishra

Cache side channel attacks are increasingly alarming in modern processors due to the recent emergence of Spectre and Meltdown attacks. A typical attack performs intentional cache access and manipulates cache states to leak secrets by…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2024-05-16 Luyi Li , Jiayi Huang , Lang Feng , Zhongfeng Wang

Covert channel attacks have been continuously studied as severe threats to modern computing systems. Software-based covert channels are a typically hard-to-detect branch of these attacks, since they leverage virtual resources to establish…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-09-23 Jeferson Gonzalez-Gomez , Jose Alejandro Ibarra-Campos , Jesus Yamir Sandoval-Morales , Lars Bauer , Jörg Henkel

Caches have been used to construct various types of covert and side channels to leak information. Most existing cache channels exploit the timing difference between cache hits and cache misses. However, we introduce a new and broader…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-04-27 Yujie Cui , Chun Yang , Xu Cheng

Computer network is unpredictable due to information warfare and is prone to various attacks. Such attacks on network compromise the most important attribute, the privacy. Most of such attacks are devised using special communication channel…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2011-01-04 Anjan K , Jibi Abraham , Mamatha Jadhav

Side-channel risks of Intel's SGX have recently attracted great attention. Under the spotlight is the newly discovered page-fault attack, in which an OS-level adversary induces page faults to observe the page-level access patterns of a…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Wenhao Wang , Guoxing Chen , Xiaorui Pan , Yinqian Zhang , XiaoFeng Wang , Vincent Bindschaedler , Haixu Tang , Carl A. Gunter

The recent discovery of the Spectre and Meltdown attacks represents a watershed moment not just for the field of Computer Security, but also of Programming Languages. This paper explores speculative side-channel attacks and their…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2019-02-15 Ross Mcilroy , Jaroslav Sevcik , Tobias Tebbi , Ben L. Titzer , Toon Verwaest

Covert communication allows us to transmit messages in such a way that it is not possible to detect that the communication is occurring. This provides protection in situations where knowledge that people are talking to each other may be…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2018-02-28 Juan Miguel Arrazola , Ryan Amiri

Recently, out-of-order execution, an important performance optimization in modern high-end processors, has been revealed to pose a significant security threat, allowing information leaks across security domains. In particular, the Meltdown…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-05-31 Marina Minkin , Daniel Moghimi , Moritz Lipp , Michael Schwarz , Jo Van Bulck , Daniel Genkin , Daniel Gruss , Frank Piessens , Berk Sunar , Yuval Yarom

Physical implementations of cryptographic algorithms leak information, which makes them vulnerable to so-called side-channel attacks. The problem of secure computation in the presence of leakage is generally known as leakage resilience. In…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2014-05-01 Felipe G. Lacerda , Joseph M. Renes , Renato Renner

Investigating network covert channels in smartphones has become increasingly important as smartphones have recently replaced the role of traditional computers. Smartphones are subject to traditional computer network covert channel…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2015-06-30 Bushra Aloraini , Daryl Johnson , Bill Stackpole , Sumita Mishra

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,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-04-24 Yu Jin , Pengfei Qiu , Chunlu Wang , Yihao Yang , Dongsheng Wang , Gang Qu

Covert channel techniques are used by attackers to transfer data in a way prohibited by the security policy. There are two main categories of covert channels: timing channels and storage channels. This paper introduces a new storage channel…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2011-05-17 Steffen Wendzel

Recent years have seen a surge in the number of data leaks despite aggressive information-containment measures deployed by cloud providers. When attackers acquire sensitive data in a secure cloud environment, covert communication channels…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-08-05 Dmitrii Ustiugov , Plamen Petrov , M. R. Siavash Katebzadeh , Boris Grot

Recently discovered Spectre and meltdown attacks affects almost all processors by leaking confidential information to other processes through side-channel attacks. These vulnerabilities expose design flaws in the architecture of modern…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-06-03 Bilal Ali Ahmad

Air-gapped computers are systems that are kept isolated from the Internet since they store or process sensitive information. In this paper, we introduce an optical covert channel in which an attacker can leak (or, exfiltlrate) sensitive…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-02-05 Mordechai Guri , Dima Bykhovsky , Yuval Elovici

Modern processors utilize an increasingly large register set to facilitate efficient floating point and SIMD computation. This large register set is a burden for operating systems, as its content needs to be saved and restored when the…

Operating Systems · Computer Science 2018-06-21 Julian Stecklina , Thomas Prescher

Multi-process concurrency is effective in improving program efficiency and maximizing CPU utilization. The correct execution of concurrency is ensured by the mutual exclusion and synchronization mechanism (MESM) that manages the shared…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Chaoqun Shen , Jiliang Zhang , Gang Qu