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Speculative execution is crucial in enhancing modern processor performance but can introduce Spectre-type vulnerabilities that may leak sensitive information. Detecting Spectre gadgets from programs has been a research focus to enhance the…

Recently, the new ciphertext side channels resulting from the deterministic memory encryption in Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), enable ciphertexts to manifest identifiable patterns when being sequentially written to the same memory…

Speculative decoding has emerged as a promising approach to accelerate autoregressive inference in large language models (LLMs). Self-draft methods, which leverage the base LLM itself for speculation, avoid the overhead of auxiliary draft…

Caches are used to reduce the speed differential between the CPU and memory to improve the performance of modern processors. However, attackers can use contention-based cache timing attacks to steal sensitive information from victim…

ARM Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) is a new hardware feature introduced in ARMv8.5-A architecture, aiming to detect memory corruption vulnerabilities. The low overhead of MTE makes it an attractive solution to mitigate memory corruption…

Out-of-order speculation, a technique ubiquitous since the early 1990s, remains a fundamental security flaw. Via attacks such as Spectre and Meltdown, an attacker can trick a victim, in an otherwise entirely correct program, into leaking…

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…

Real-time sequential control agents are often bottlenecked by inference latency. Even modest per-step planning delays can destabilize control and degrade overall performance. We propose a speculation-and-correction framework that adapts the…

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…

Modern computer scaling trends in pursuit of larger component counts and power efficiency have, unfortunately, lead to less reliable hardware and consequently soft errors escaping into application data ("silent data corruptions").…

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…

Transient execution attacks, also called speculative execution attacks, have drawn much interest as they exploit the transient execution of instructions, e.g., during branch prediction, to leak data. Transient execution is fundamental to…

Confidential computing on GPUs, like NVIDIA H100, mitigates the security risks of outsourced Large Language Models (LLMs) by implementing strong isolation and data encryption. Nonetheless, this encryption incurs a significant performance…

The disclosure of the Spectre speculative-execution attacks in January 2018 has left a severe vulnerability that systems are still struggling with how to patch. The solutions that currently exist tend to have incomplete coverage, perform…

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates LLM inference by verifying draft tokens in parallel. However, this method presents a critical trade-off: it improves throughput in low-load, memory-bound systems but degrades performance in high-load,…

We present uSpectre, a new class of transient execution attacks that exploit microcode branch mispredictions to transiently leak sensitive data. We find that many long-known and recently-discovered transient execution attacks, which were…

LLM inference on mobile devices faces extraneous challenges due to limited memory bandwidth and computational resources. To address these issues, speculative inference and processing-in-memory (PIM) techniques have been explored at the…

Recently, speculative decoding (SD) has emerged as a promising technique to accelerate LLM inference by employing a small draft model to propose draft tokens in advance, and validating them in parallel with the large target model. However,…

We present Janus, a compiler-based security framework that mitigates transient execution attacks like Spectre and control-flow hijacking on ARM64 platforms. Janus integrates speculative execution and control flow dependencies with PA…

Irregular codes are bottlenecked by memory and communication latency. Decoupled access/execute (DAE) is a common technique to tackle this problem. It relies on the compiler to separate memory address generation from the rest of the program,…