Publications related to Meltdown (security vulnerability)

Benchmarking machine-readable vectors of chemical reactions on computed activation barriers

Anne-Clémence Corminboeuf, Ksenia Briling, Puck Elisabeth van Gerwen, Yannick Calvino Alonso, Malte Martin Franke

In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in predicting computed activation barriers, to enable the acceleration of the automated exploration of reaction networks. Consequently, various predictive approaches have emerged, ranging from graph-based ...

Royal Soc Chemistry2024

Latency Interfaces for Systems Code

Rishabh Ramesh Iyer

This thesis demonstrates that it is feasible for systems code to expose a latency interface that describes its latency and related side effects for all inputs, just like the code's semantic interface describes its functionality and related side effects. S ...

EPFL2023

A review of the security vulnerabilities and countermeasures in the Internet of Things solutions: A bright future for the Blockchain

Jan Van Herle, Hossein Pourrahmani

The current advances in the Internet of Things (IoT) and the solutions being offered by this technology have accounted IoT among the top ten technologies that will transform the global economy by 2030. IoT is a state-of-the-art paradigm that has developed ...

2023

LAQy: Efficient and Reusable Query Approximations via Lazy Sampling

Anastasia Ailamaki, Viktor Sanca, Periklis Chrysogelos

Modern analytical engines rely on Approximate Query Processing (AQP) to provide faster response times than the hardware allows for exact query answering. However, existing AQP methods impose steep performance penalties as workload unpredictability increase ...

2023

A RISC-V Extension to Minimize Privileges of Enclave Runtimes

Edouard Bugnion, Neelu Shivprakash Kalani

In confidential computing, the view of the system software is Manichean: the host operating system is untrusted and the TEE runtime system is fully trusted. However, the runtime system is often as complex as a full operating system, and thus is not free fr ...

ACM2023

The Side-channel Metrics Cheat Sheet

Francesco Regazzoni, Mirjana Stojilovic, Ognjen Glamocanin, Dorian Ros

Side-channel attacks exploit a physical observable originating from a cryptographic device in order to extract its secrets. Many practically relevant advances in the field of side-channel analysis relate to security evaluations of cryptographic functions a ...

2023

Electrical-Level Attacks on CPUs, FPGAs, and GPUs: Survey and Implications in the Heterogeneous Era

Mirjana Stojilovic, Dina Gamaleldin Ahmed Shawky Mahmoud

Given the need for efficient high-performance computing, computer architectures combining CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs are nowadays prevalent. However, each of these components suffers from electrical-level security risks. Moving to heterogeneous systems, with th ...

2022

MINERVA: Browser API Fuzzing with Dynamic Mod-Ref Analysis

Mathias Josef Payer, Yu Jiang, Chijin Zhou

Browser APIs are essential to the modern web experience. Due to their large number and complexity, they vastly expand the attack surface of browsers. To detect vulnerabilities in these APIs, fuzzers generate test cases with a large amount of random API inv ...

Assoc Computing Machinery2022

Distributed Momentum for Byzantine-resilient Stochastic Gradient Descent

Rachid Guerraoui, El Mahdi El Mhamdi, Sébastien Louis Alexandre Rouault

Byzantine-resilient Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) aims at shielding model training from Byzantine faults, be they ill-labeled training datapoints, exploited software/hardware vulnerabilities, or malicious worker nodes in a distributed setting. Two rece ...

2021

Preventing Use-After-Free Attacks with Fast Forward Allocation

Sanidhya Kashyap, Jungwon Lim

Memory-unsafe languages are widely used to implement critical systems like kernels and browsers, leading to thousands of memory safety issues every year. A use-after-free bug is a temporal memory error where the program accidentally visits a freed memory l ...

USENIX ASSOC2021

SpecROP: Speculative Exploitation of ROP Chains

Mathias Josef Payer, Atri Bhattacharyya, Andrés Sánchez Marín

Speculative execution attacks, such as Spectre, reuse code from the victim’s binary to access and leak secret information during speculative execution. Every variant of the attack requires very particular code sequences, necessitating elaborate gadget-sear ...

2020

X-Attack: Remote Activation of Satisfiability Don’t-Care Hardware Trojans on Shared FPGAs

Mirjana Stojilovic, Dina Gamaleldin Ahmed Shawky Mahmoud, Wei Hu

Albeit very appealing, FPGA multitenancy in the cloud computing environment is currently on hold due to a number of recently discovered vulnerabilities to side-channel attacks and covert communication. In this work, we successfully demonstrate a new attack ...

IEEE2020

Analysis of Functional Errors Produced by Long-Term Workload-Dependent BTI Degradation in Ultra-Low Power Processors

David Atienza Alonso, Alexandre Sébastien Julien Levisse, Ruben Braojos Lopez, Miguel Peon Quiros, Loris Gérard Duch

Aging effects in digital circuits change the switching characteristics of their transistors, resulting in timing violations that can lead to functional errors at the system level. In particular, BTI is a degradation effect that changes the threshold voltag ...

2020

HetExchange: Encapsulating heterogeneous CPU-GPU parallelism in JIT compiled engines

Anastasia Ailamaki, Manolis Karpathiotakis, Raja Appuswamy, Periklis Chrysogelos

Modern server hardware is increasingly heterogeneous as hardware accelerators, such as GPUs, are used together with multicore CPUs to meet the computational demands of modern data analytics workloads. Unfortunately, query parallelization techniques used by ...

2019

SMoTherSpectre: Exploiting Speculative Execution through Port Contention

Babak Falsafi, Mathias Josef Payer, Atri Bhattacharyya

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 what extent other ...

ACM2019

FirmFuzz: Automated IoT Firmware Introspection and Analysis

Mathias Josef Payer, Hui Peng

While the number of IoT devices grows at an exhilarating pace their security remains stagnant. Imposing secure coding standards across all vendors is infeasible. Testing individual devices allows an analyst to evaluate their security post deployment. Any d ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2019

Efficient Workload Colocation in Modern Data Centers

Calin Iorgulescu

Despite the high costs of acquisition and maintenance of modern data centers, machine resource utilization is often low. Servers running online interactive services are over-provisioned to support peak load (which only occurs for a fraction of the time), d ...

EPFL2019

Pythia: Remote Oracles for the Masses

Mathias Josef Payer, Yuqing Zhang

Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) is a technology that allows direct access from the network to a machine's main memory without involving its CPU. RDMA offers low-latency, high-bandwidth performance and low CPU utilization. While RDMA provides massive per ...

USENIX ASSOC2019

Hardware-conscious Hash-Joins on GPUs

Anastasia Ailamaki, Manolis Karpathiotakis, Raja Appuswamy, Periklis Chrysogelos, Panagiotis Sioulas

Traditionally, analytical database engines have used task parallelism provided by modern multisocket multicore CPUs for scaling query execution. Over the past few years, GPUs have started gaining traction as accelerators for processing analytical queries d ...

IEEE2019

Milkomeda: Safeguarding the Mobile GPU Interface Using WebGL Security Checks

Mathias Josef Payer

GPU-accelerated graphics is commonly used in mobile applications. Unfortunately, the graphics interface exposes a large amount of potentially vulnerable kernel code (i.e., the GPU device driver) to untrusted applications. This broad attack surface has resu ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2018