Related papers: A Security Analysis of CheriBSD and Morello Linux

Directory-based protocols have been the de facto solution for maintaining cache coherence in shared-memory parallel systems comprising multi/many cores, where each store instruction is eagerly made globally visible by invalidating the…

While there is a large body of work on analyzing concurrency related software bugs and developing techniques for detecting and patching them, little attention has been given to concurrency related security vulnerabilities. The two are…

In this paper, we present PoisonCap: scalable temporal safety with strict use-after-free protection and initialisation safety for CHERI systems. Efficient memory safety is an increasing priority for programming languages, operating systems,…

We present a software approach to mitigate access-driven side-channel attacks that leverage last-level caches (LLCs) shared across cores to leak information between security domains (e.g., tenants in a cloud). Our approach dynamically…

Programs written in C/C++ can suffer from serious memory fragmentation, leading to low utilization of memory, degraded performance, and application failure due to memory exhaustion. This paper introduces Mesh, a plug-in replacement for…

Multi-core processors improve performance, but they can create unpredictability owing to shared resources such as caches interfering. Cache partitioning is used to alleviate the Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET) estimation by isolating the…

Modern computer processors use microarchitectural optimization mechanisms to improve performance. As a downside, such optimizations are prone to introducing side-channel vulnerabilities. Speculative loading of memory, called prefetching, is…

The security of billions of devices worldwide depends on the security and robustness of the mainline Linux kernel. However, the increasing number of kernel-specific vulnerabilities, especially memory safety vulnerabilities, shows that the…

Embedded devices are ubiquitous. However, preliminary evidence shows that attack mitigations protecting our desktops/servers/phones are missing in embedded devices, posing a significant threat to embedded security. To this end, this paper…

The prevalence of memory corruption bugs in the past decades resulted in numerous defenses, such as stack canaries, control flow integrity (CFI), and memory safe languages. These defenses can prevent entire classes of vulnerabilities, and…

In order to achieve fault tolerance, highly reliable system often require the ability to detect errors as soon as they occur and prevent the speared of erroneous information throughout the system. Thus, the need for codes capable of…

Traditional side-channels take advantage of secrets being used as inputs to unsafe instructions, used for memory accesses, or used in control flow decisions. Constant-time programming, which restricts such code patterns, has been widely…

This paper provides the first systematic analysis of a synergistic threat model encompassing memory corruption vulnerabilities and microarchitectural side-channel vulnerabilities. We study speculative shield bypass attacks that leverage…

Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) sharing is an important activity to reduce information asymmetries between attackers and defenders. However, this activity presents challenges due to the tension between data sharing and confidentiality, that…

A recent discovery of a new class of microarchitectural attacks called Spectre picked up the attention of the security community as these attacks can circumvent many traditional mechanisms of defense. One of the attacks---Bounds Check…

External fragmentation of physical memory occurs when adjacent differently sized regions of allocated physical memory are freed at different times, causing free memory to be physically discontiguous. It can significantly degrade system…

In this paper we investigate the feasibility of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks on shared caches in multicore platforms. With carefully engineered attacker tasks, we are able to cause more than 300X execution time increases on a victim task…

This technical report describes a new extension to capability machines. Capability machines are a special type of processors that include better security primitives at the hardware level. In capability machines, every word has an associated…

We investigate the minimal number of failures that can partition a system where processes communicate both through shared memory and by message passing. We prove that this number precisely captures the resilience that can be achieved by…

Data deduplication is able to effectively identify and eliminate redundant data and only maintain a single copy of files and chunks. Hence, it is widely used in cloud storage systems to save storage space and network bandwidth. However, the…