Related papers: Janus: Compiler-Based Defense Against Transient Ex…

Modern processors use branch prediction and speculative execution to maximize performance. For example, if the destination of a branch depends on a memory value that is in the process of being read, CPUs will try guess the destination and…

Practical attacks that exploit speculative execution can leak confidential information via microarchitectural side channels. The recently-demonstrated Spectre attacks leverage speculative loads which circumvent access checks to read…

This paper describes JANUS, a modular massively parallel and reconfigurable FPGA-based computing system. Each JANUS module has a computational core and a host. The computational core is a 4x4 array of FPGA-based processing elements with…

Modern microprocessors depend on speculative execution, creating vulnerabilities that enable transient execution attacks. Prior defenses target speculative data leakage but overlook false dependencies from partial address aliasing, where…

Research on transient execution attacks including Spectre and Meltdown showed that exception or branch misprediction events might leave secret-dependent traces in the CPU's microarchitectural state. This observation led to a proliferation…

Caches have been exploited to leak secret information due to the different times they take to handle memory accesses. Cache timing attacks include non-speculative cache side and covert channel attacks and cache-based speculative execution…

We 1) present the first rigorous security, performance, energy, and cost analyses of the state-of-the-art on-DRAM-die read disturbance mitigation method, Per Row Activation Counting (PRAC) and 2) propose Chronus, a new mechanism that…

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,…

Serving large Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models is challenging because of their large memory footprints, heterogeneous resource demands, and highly dynamic inference workloads. Most existing MoE inference systems deploy the entire model as a…

Out-of-order execution and speculative execution are among the biggest contributors to performance and efficiency of modern processors. However, they are inconsiderate, leaking secret data during the transient execution of instructions.…

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…

The Spectre family of speculative execution attacks have required a rethinking of formal methods for security. Approaches based on operational speculative semantics have made initial inroads towards finding vulnerable code and validating…

Transient execution attacks that exploit speculation have raised significant concerns in computer systems. Typically, branch predictors are leveraged to trigger mis-speculation in transient execution attacks. In this work, we demonstrate a…

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel at handling graph data but remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Existing defense methods typically rely on assumptions like graph sparsity and homophily to either preprocess the graph or guide…

Since the advent of SPECTRE, a number of countermeasures have been proposed and deployed. Rigorously reasoning about their effectiveness, however, requires a well-defined notion of security against speculative execution attacks, which has…

Modern society is getting accustomed to the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) for a variety of applications that involves security-critical user data and information transfers. In the lower end of the spectrum, these…

The recent Spectre attacks has demonstrated the fundamental insecurity of current computer microarchitecture. The attacks use features like pipelining, out-of-order and speculation to extract arbitrary information about the memory contents…

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…

The benefits that arise from the adoption of a systems engineering approach to the design of engineered systems are well understood and documented. However , with software systems, different approaches are required given the changeability…

We describe Janus, a massively parallel FPGA-based computer optimized for the simulation of spin glasses, theoretical models for the behavior of glassy materials. FPGAs (as compared to GPUs or many-core processors) provide a complementary…