相关论文: Meltdown
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…
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…
The development of quantum computers has been advancing rapidly in recent years. As quantum computers become more widely accessible, potentially malicious users could try to execute their code on the machines to leak information from other…
Caches have become the prime method for unintended information extraction across logical isolation boundaries. Even Spectre and Meltdown rely on the cache side channel, as it provides great resolution and is widely available on all major…
In the last two decades, the evolving cyber-threat landscape has brought to center stage the contentious tradeoffs between the security and performance of modern microprocessors. The guarantees provided by the hardware to ensure no…
Cache side-channel attacks lead to severe security threats to the settings that a CPU is shared across users, e.g., in the cloud. The existing attacks rely on sensing the micro-architectural state changes made by victims, and this…
To improve efficiency, nearly all parallel processing units (CPUs and GPUs) implement relaxed memory models in which memory operations may be re-ordered, i.e., executed out-of-order. Prior testing work in this area found that memory…
Cache side channel attacks are increasingly alarming in modern processors due to the recent emergence of Spectre and Meltdown attacks. A typical attack performs intentional cache access and manipulates cache states to leak secrets by…
Side-channel attacks are a security exploit that take advantage of information leakage. They use measurement and analysis of physical parameters to reverse engineer and extract secrets from a system. Power analysis attacks in particular,…
Recent Microsoft security bulletins show that kernel vulnerabilities are becoming more and more important security threats. Despite the pretty extensive security mitigations many of the kernel vulnerabilities are still exploitable.…
Modern operating systems (OSes) have unfettered access to application data, assuming that applications trust them. This assumption, however, is problematic under many scenarios where either the OS provider is not trustworthy or the OS can…
Nowadays, in operating systems, numerous protection mechanisms prevent or limit the user-mode applicationsto access the kernels internal information. This is regularlycarried out by software-based defenses such as Address Space Layout…
The recent Meltdown and Spectre attacks highlight the importance of automated verification techniques for identifying hardware security vulnerabilities. We have developed a tool for synthesizing microarchitecture-specific programs capable…
Microcode is an abstraction layer used by modern x86 processors that interprets user-visible CISC instructions to hardware-internal RISC instructions. The capability to update x86 microcode enables a vendor to modify CPU behavior in-field,…
The recent discovery of the Spectre and Meltdown attacks represents a watershed moment not just for the field of Computer Security, but also of Programming Languages. This paper explores speculative side-channel attacks and their…
Modern x86 processors have many prefetch instructions that can be used by programmers to boost performance. However, these instructions may also cause security problems. In particular, we found that on Intel processors, there are two…
Spectre, Meltdown, and related attacks have demonstrated that kernels, hypervisors, trusted execution environments, and browsers are prone to information disclosure through micro-architectural weaknesses. However, it remains unclear as to…
Windows OS kernel memory is one of the main targets of cyber-attacks. By launching such attacks, hackers are succeeding in process privilege escalation and tampering with users data by accessing kernel mode memory. This paper considers a…
Whenever modern CPUs encounter a conditional branch for which the condition cannot be evaluated yet, they predict the likely branch target and speculatively execute code. Such pipelining is key to optimizing runtime performance and is…
The widespread deployment of control-flow integrity has propelled non-control data attacks into the mainstream. In the domain of OS kernel exploits, by corrupting critical non-control data, local attackers can directly gain root access or…