Related papers: DRsam: Detection of Fault-Based Microarchitectural…
RISC-V is an emerging technology, with applications ranging from embedded devices to high-performance servers. Therefore, more and more security-critical workloads will be conducted with code that is compiled for RISC-V. Well-known…
Side-channel attacks on microprocessors, like the RISC-V, exhibit security vulnerabilities that lead to several design challenges. Hence, it is imperative to study and analyze these security vulnerabilities comprehensively. In this paper,…
Rigorous quantitative evaluation of microarchitectural side channels is challenging for two reasons. First, the processors, attacks, and defenses often exhibit probabilistic behaviors. These probabilistic behaviors arise due to natural…
Microprocessor design, debug, and validation research and development are increasingly based on modeling and simulation at different abstraction layers. Microarchitecture-level simulators have become the most commonly used tools for…
Security in modern RISC-V processors demands more than functional correctness: It requires resilience to side-channel attacks. This paper evaluates the vulnerability of the side channel of the CVA6 RISC-V core by analyzing software-based…
Microarchitectural timing side channels have been thoroughly investigated as a security threat in hardware designs featuring shared buffers (e.g., caches) or parallelism between attacker and victim task execution. However, contradicting…
Side-channel attacks have become a severe threat to the confidentiality of computer applications and systems. One popular type of such attacks is the microarchitectural attack, where the adversary exploits the hardware features to break the…
The power consumption of a microprocessor is a huge channel for information leakage. While the most popular exploitation of this channel is to recover cryptographic keys from embedded devices, other applications such as mobile app…
The run-time electromagnetic (EM) emanation of microprocessors presents a side-channel that leaks the confidentiality of the applications running on them. Many recent works have demonstrated successful attacks leveraging such side-channels…
Cryptographic computations are fundamental to modern computing, ensuring data confidentiality and integrity. However, these operations are highly vulnerable to power side-channel attacks that exploit variations in power consumption to leak…
Secret keys can be extracted from the power consumption or electromagnetic emanations of unprotected devices. Traditional counter-measures have limited scope of protection, and impose several restrictions on how sensitive data must be…
Integrating cryptographic accelerators into modern CPU architectures presents unique microarchitectural challenges, particularly when extending instruction sets with complex and multistage operations. Hardware-assisted cryptographic…
As RISC-V architectures proliferate across embedded and high-performance domains, developers face persistent challenges in performance optimization due to fragmented tooling, immature hardware features, and platform-specific defects. This…
Fault injection attacks represent a class of threats that can compromise embedded systems across multiple layers of abstraction, such as system software, instruction set architecture (ISA), microarchitecture, and physical implementation.…
Microarchitectural side channels expose unprotected software to information leakage attacks where a software adversary is able to track runtime behavior of a benign process and steal secrets such as cryptographic keys. As suggested by…
Covert channels enable information leakage across security boundaries of the operating system. Microarchitectural covert channels exploit changes in execution timing resulting from competing access to limited hardware resources. We use the…
Modern RISC vector processors rely on the synergy of multi-lane parallelism and chaining to achieve high sustained throughput, yet their achieved performance often falls substantially short of the theoretical performance bound due to…
Various studies among side-channel attacks have tried to extract information through leakages from electronic devices to reach the instruction flow of some appliances. However, previous methods highly depend on the resolution of traced…
The complexity of modern processor architectures has given rise to sophisticated interactions among their components. Such interactions may result in potential attack vectors in terms of side channels, possibly available to user-land…
Microarchitectural timing attacks exploit subtle timing variations caused by hardware behaviors to leak sensitive information. In this paper, we introduce MCHammer, a novel side-channel technique that leverages machine clears induced by…