Publications related to Spectre (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

Instruction-Level Power Side-Channel Leakage Evaluation of Soft-Core CPUs on Shared FPGAs

Mathias Josef Payer, Mirjana Stojilovic, Shashwat Shrivastava, Ognjen Glamocanin, Jinwei Yao, Nour Ardo

Side-channel disassembly attacks recover CPU instructions from power or electromagnetic side-channel traces measured during code execution. These attacks typically rely on physical access, proximity to the victim device, and high sampling rate measuring in ...

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

A Deep-Learning Approach to Side-Channel Based CPU Disassembly at Design Time

Mirjana Stojilovic

Side-channel CPU disassembly is a side-channel attack that allows an adversary to recover instructions executed by a processor. Not only does such an attack compromise code confidentiality, it can also reveal critical information on the system’s internals. ...

IEEE2022

Micro BTB: A High Performance and Storage Efficient Last-Level Branch Target Buffer for Servers

Vishal Gupta

High-performance branch target buffers (BTBs) and the L1I cache are key to high-performance front-end. Modern branch predictors are highly accurate, but with an increase in code footprint in modern-day server workloads, BTB and L1I misses are still frequen ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2022

Leaking Secrets Through Compressed Caches

Daniel Felipe Forero Sanchez

We offer the first security analysis of cache compression, a promising architectural technique that is likely to appear in future mainstream processors. We find that cache compression has novel security implications because the compressibility of a cache l ...

IEEE COMPUTER SOC2021

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

Micro-architectural Analysis of Database Workloads

Utku Sirin

Database workloads have significantly evolved in the past twenty years. Traditional database systems that are mainly used to serve Online Transactional Processing (OLTP) workloads evolved into specialized database systems that are optimized for particular ...

EPFL2021

Optimal Adversarial Policies in the Multiplicative Learning System With a Malicious Expert

Negar Kiyavash, Seyed Jalal Etesami

We consider a learning system based on the conventional multiplicative weight ( MW) rule that combines experts' advice to predict a sequence of true outcomes. It is assumed that one of the experts is malicious and aims to impose the maximum loss on the sys ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2021

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

mu RAI: Securing Embedded Systems with Return Address Integrity

Mathias Josef Payer

Embedded systems are deployed in security critical environments and have become a prominent target for remote attacks. Microcontroller-based systems (MCUS) are particularly vulnerable due to a combination of limited resources and low level programming whic ...

INTERNET SOC2020

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

Are Cloud FPGAs Really Vulnerable to Power Analysis Attacks?

Francesco Regazzoni, Mirjana Stojilovic, Ognjen Glamocanin, Louis Coulon

Recent works have demonstrated the possibility of extracting secrets from a cryptographic core running on an FPGA by means of remote power analysis attacks. To mount these attacks, an adversary implements a voltage fluctuation sensor in the FPGA logic, rec ...

IEEE2020