Related papers: (Dis)Proving Spectre Security with Speculation-Pas…

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…

There is increasing interest in applying verification tools to programs that have bitvector operations. SMT solvers, which serve as a foundation for these tools, have thus increased support for bitvector reasoning through bit-blasting and…

This manuscript describes the software package SCOUT, which analyzes, characterizes, and corrects one-dimensional signals. Specifically, it allows to check and correct for stationarity, detect spurious samples, check for normality, check…

LLMs have low GPU efficiency and high latency due to autoregressive decoding. Speculative decoding (SD) mitigates this using a small draft model to speculatively generate multiple tokens, which are then verified in parallel by a target…

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…

Microarchitectural attacks represent a challenging and persistent threat to modern processors, exploiting inherent design vulnerabilities in processors to leak sensitive information or compromise systems. Of particular concern is the…

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…

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…

Background: Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tools purport to assist developers in detecting security issues in source code. These tools typically use rule-based approaches to scan source code for security vulnerabilities.…

We propose a new system identification method, called Sign-Perturbed Sums (SPS), for constructing non-asymptotic confidence regions under mild statistical assumptions. SPS is introduced for linear regression models, including but not…

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…

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model inference by allowing a lightweight draft model to propose outputs that a stronger target model verifies. However, its token-centric nature allows erroneous steps to propagate.…

Spectre attacks and their many subsequent variants are a new vulnerability class affecting modern CPUs. The attacks rely on the ability to misguide speculative execution, generally by exploiting the branch prediction structures, to execute…

Since the discovery of Spectre, a large number of hardware mechanisms for secure speculation has been proposed. Intuitively, more defensive mechanisms are less efficient but can securely execute a larger class of programs, while more…

State-of-the-art noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers require low-complexity techniques for the mitigation of computational errors inflicted by quantum decoherence. Symmetry verification constitutes a class of quantum error mitigation…

The problem of transferring calibrations from a primary to a secondary instrument, i.e. calibration transfer (CT), has been a matter of considerable research in chemometrics over the past decades. Current state-of-the-art (SoA) methods like…

To harness the power of multi-core and distributed platforms, and to make the development of concurrent software more accessible to software engineers, different object-oriented concurrency models such as SCOOP have been proposed. Despite…

Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) provides new opportunities for automated vulnerability identification in software products. While the industry is adopting SBOM-based Vulnerability Scanning (SVS) to identify vulnerabilities, we…

Speculative sampling (SpS) has been successful in accelerating the decoding throughput of auto-regressive large language models by leveraging smaller draft models. SpS strictly enforces the generated distribution to match that of the…

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…