Security Research: Technical Paper Round-up


A number of hardware security-related technical papers were presented at the August 2023 USENIX Security Symposium. Here are some highlights with associated links. [table id=130 /] A complete listing of all papers presented at this summer's USENIX conference can be found here and here. The organization provides open access research, and the presentation slides and papers are free to the p... » read more

Modeling and Testing Microarchitectural Leakage of CPU Exceptions (Microsoft, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)


A new technical paper titled "Speculation at Fault: Modeling and Testing Microarchitectural Leakage of CPU Exceptions" was published by researchers at Microsoft and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. This paper was included at the recent 32nd USENIX Security Symposium. Abstract: "Microarchitectural leakage models provide effective tools to prevent vulnerabilities such as Spectre and Meltdown vi... » read more

Microarchitectural Side-Channel Attacks And Defenses on NVRAM DIMMs


A new technical paper titled "NVLeak: Off-Chip Side-Channel Attacks via Non-Volatile Memory Systems" was published by researchers at UC San Diego, Purdue University, and UT Austin. This paper was included at the recent 32nd USENIX Security Symposium. Abstract: "We study microarchitectural side-channel attacks and defenses on non-volatile RAM (NVRAM) DIMMs. In this study, we first perform r... » read more

Physical Removal Attack On LiDAR Sensors And Mitigation Strategies


A technical paper titled "You Can't See Me: Physical Removal Attacks on LiDAR-based Autonomous Vehicles Driving Frameworks" was published by researchers at University of Michigan, University of Florida and the University of Electro-Communications (Japan). This paper was included at the recent 32nd USENIX Security Symposium. Abstract: "Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) increasingly use LiDAR-base... » read more

Remote Direct Memory Introspection (Rice, Duke, MIT)


A technical paper titled "Remote Direct Memory Introspection" was published by researchers at Rice University, Duke University, and MIT. This paper won a distinguished paper award at the recent 32nd USENIX Security Symposium. Abstract: "Hypervisors have played a critical role in cloud security, but they introduce a large trusted computing base (TCB) and incur a heavy performance tax. As of... » read more

Week In Review: Automotive, Security and Pervasive Computing


The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety estimates that between 2021 and 2050, ADAS technologies currently available to U.S. will prevent "approximately 37 million crashes, 14 million injuries, and nearly 250,000 deaths, which would represent 16% of crashes and injuries, and 22% of deaths that would otherwise occur on U.S. roads without these technologies," according to a new report. Governmen... » read more

Security Research: Technical Paper Round-Up


A number of hardware security-related technical papers were presented at recent conferences, including the August 2022 USENIX Security Symposium and IEEE’s International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST). Topics include side-channel attacks and defenses (including on-chip mesh interconnect attacks), heterogeneous attacks on cache hierarchies, rowhammer attacks and mitig... » read more

Hertzbleed: A New Family of Side-Channel Attacks–Root Case: Dynamic Frequency Scaling


  New research paper titled "Hertzbleed: Turning Power Side-Channel Attacks Into Remote Timing Attacks on x86" from researchers at UT Austin, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and University of Washington can be found here. (preprint). This paper will be presented at the 31st USENIX Security Symposium (Boston, 10–12 August 2022). Summary explanation of the Hertzbleed ... » read more

Security Research Bits


A number of hardware security-related technical papers were presented at the August 2021 USENIX Security Symposium. The organization provides open access research, and the presentation slides and papers are free to the public. Topics include side-channel attacks and defenses, embedded security, hardware security tokens, and more. Here are some highlights with associated links:   [tab... » read more

PTAuth: Temporal Memory Safety via Robust Points-to Authentication


Authors: Reza Mirzazade Farkhani, Mansour Ahmadi, and Long Lu, Northeastern University Abstract: "Temporal memory corruptions are commonly exploited software vulnerabilities that can lead to powerful attacks. Despite significant progress made by decades of research on mitigation techniques, existing countermeasures fall short due to either limited coverage or overly high overhead. Further... » read more

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