Related papers: Pre-cache: A Microarchitectural Solution to preven…

In the main text published at USENIX Security 2025, we presented a systematic analysis of the role of cache occupancy in the design considerations for randomized caches (from the perspectives of performance and security). On the performance…

Spectre attacks exploit speculative execution to leak sensitive information. In the last few years, a number of static side-channel detectors have been proposed to detect cache leakage in the presence of speculative execution. However,…

In this work we examine how the updates addressing Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities impact the performance of HPC applications. To study this we use the application kernel module of XDMoD to test the performance before and after the…

Microarchitectural optimizations are expected to play a crucial role in ensuring performance scalability in future technology nodes. However, recent attacks have demonstrated that microarchitectural optimizations, which were assumed to be…

Microarchitectural attacks on CPU structures have been studied in native applications, as well as in web browsers. These attacks continue to be a substantial threat to computing systems at all scales. With the proliferation of heterogeneous…

We present a new hardware-agnostic side-channel attack that targets one of the most fundamental software caches in modern computer systems: the operating system page cache. The page cache is a pure software cache that contains all…

Modern multicore processors are employing large last-level caches, for example Intel's E7-8800 processor uses 24MB L3 cache. Further, with each CMOS technology generation, leakage energy has been dramatically increasing and hence, leakage…

Different from the traditional software vulnerability, the microarchitecture side channel has three characteristics: extensive influence, potent threat, and tough defense. The main reason for the micro-architecture side channel is resource…

Side channel attacks steal secret keys by cleverly leveraging information leakages and can, therefore, break encryption. Thus, detection and mitigation of side channel attacks is a very important problem, but the solutions proposed in the…

Speculative execution is an optimization technique that has been part of CPUs for over a decade. It predicts the outcome and target of branch instructions to avoid stalling the execution pipeline. However, until recently, the security…

In cloud computing environments, multiple tenants are often co-located on the same multi-processor system. Thus, preventing information leakage between tenants is crucial. While the hypervisor enforces software isolation, shared hardware,…

Accelerators used for machine learning (ML) inference provide great performance benefits over CPUs. Securing confidential model in inference against off-chip side-channel attacks is critical in harnessing the performance advantage in…

Intel SGX is known to be vulnerable to a class of practical attacks exploiting memory access pattern side-channels, notably page-fault attacks and cache timing attacks. A promising hardening scheme is to wrap applications in hardware…

Computer systems often provide hardware support for isolation mechanisms like privilege levels, virtual memory, or enclaved execution. Over the past years, several successful software-based side-channel attacks have been developed that…

This paper introduces Okapi, a new hardware/software cross-layer architecture designed to mitigate Transient Execution Side Channel attacks, including Spectre variants, in modern computing systems. Okapi provides a hardware basis for secure…

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…

Modern processor designs use a variety of microarchitectural methods to achieve high performance. Unfortunately, new side-channels have often been uncovered that exploit these enhanced designs. One area that has received little attention…

Recent work has introduced attacks that extract the architecture information of deep neural networks (DNN), as this knowledge enhances an adversary's capability to conduct black-box attacks against the model. This paper presents the first…

The efficacy of address space layout randomization has been formally demonstrated in a shared-memory model by Abadi et al., contingent on specific assumptions about victim programs. However, modern operating systems, implementing layout…

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…