We introduce Downfall attacks, new transient execution attacks that undermine the security
of computers running everywhere across the internet. We exploit the gather instruction on …

Spectre v2 is one of the most severe transient execution vulnerabilities, as it allows an
unprivileged attacker to lure a privileged (eg, kernel) victim into speculatively jum** to a …

Since the discovery of Spectre, a large number of hardware mechanisms for secure
speculation has been proposed. Intuitively, more defensive mechanisms are less efficient …

Timing attacks are among the most devastating side-channel attacks, allowing remote
attackers to retrieve secret material, including cryptographic keys, with relative ease. In …

We describe Swivel, a new compiler framework for hardening WebAssembly (Wasm)
against Spectre attacks. Outside the browser, Wasm has become a popular lightweight, in …

In the era of microarchitectural side channels, vendors scramble to deploy mitigations for
transient execution attacks, but leave traditional side-channel attacks against sensitive …

Spectre vulnerabilities violate our fundamental assumptions about architectural abstractions,
allowing attackers to steal sensitive data despite previously state-of-the-art …

In this paper we revisit the Spectre v1 vulnerability and software-only countermeasures.
Specifically, we systematically investigate the performance penalty and security properties of …

Leakage contracts have recently been proposed as a new security abstraction at the
Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) level. Leakage contracts aim to capture the information that …

We introduce Blade, a new approach to automatically and efficiently eliminate speculative
leaks from cryptographic code. Blade is built on the insight that to stop leaks via speculative …