Confidential Virtual Machines (CVMs), such as AMD SEV-SNP, aim to protect guest operating systems from an untrusted host by encrypting state and constraining privileged control. These platforms promise isolation even in multi-tenant cloud setups …
Confidential virtual machines (CVMs) based on trusted execution environments (TEEs) enable new privacy-preserving solutions. Yet, they leave side-channel leakage outside their threat model, shifting the responsibility of mitigating such attacks to …
The open and extensible RISC-V instruction set architecture has enabled a wide range of new CPU vendors and implementations. However, most commercially available RISC-V CPUs are closed-source, making it challenging to analyze them for security …
Microarchitectural attacks pose an increasing threat to system security. They enable attackers to extract sensitive information such as cryptographic keys, website usage patterns, or keystrokes. Softwarelevel defenses, such as constant-time …
Hardware prefetchers are an optimization in modern CPUs for predicting memory accesses and preemptively loading the corresponding value into the cache. Previous work showed that the internal state of hardware prefetchers can act as a side channel, …
AMD SEV is a trusted-execution environment (TEE), providing confidentiality and integrity for virtual machines (VMs). With AMD SEV, it is possible to securely run VMs on an untrusted hypervisor. While previous attacks demonstrated architectural …
In the last years, there has been a rapid increase in microarchitectural attacks, exploiting side effects of various parts of the CPU. Most of them have in common that they rely on timing differences, requiring a high-resolution timer to make …
Microarchitectural attacks threaten the security of computer systems even in the absence of software vulnerabilities. Such attacks are well explored on x86 and ARM CPUs, with a wide range of proposed but not-yet deployed hardware countermeasures. …