When working towards application-tuned systems, developers often find themselves caught between the need to share information (so that partners can make intelligent design choices) and the need to hide information (to protect proprietary methods or ...

Many modern defenses against code reuse rely on hiding sensitive data such as shadow stacks in a huge memory address space. While much more efficient than traditional integrity-based defenses, these solutions are vulnerable to probing attacks which ...

This paper describes context-sensitive fencing (CSF), a microcode-level defense against multiple variants of Spectre. CSF leverages the ability to dynamically alter the decoding of the instruction stream, to seamlessly inject new micro-ops, including ...

Kernel information leak vulnerabilities are a major security threat to production systems. Attackers can exploit them to leak confidential information such as cryptographic keys or kernel pointers. Despite efforts by kernel developers and researchers, ...

The CHERI architecture allows pointers to be implemented as capabilities (rather than integer virtual addresses) in a manner that is compatible with, and strengthens, the semantics of the C language. In addition to the spatial protections offered by ...

Attacks often succeed by abusing the gap between program and machine-level semantics-- for example, by locating a sensitive pointer, exploiting a bug to overwrite this sensitive data, and hijacking the victim program's execution. In this work, we take ...

High availability is the most important and challenging problem for cloud providers. However, virtual machine monitor (VMM), a crucial component of the cloud infrastructure, has to be frequently updated and restarted to add security patches and new ...

Traditional CPUs and cloud systems based on them have embraced the hardware-based trusted execution environments to securely isolate computation from malicious OS or hardware attacks. However, GPUs and their cloud deployments have yet to include such ...

"Cloud-native" container platforms, such as Kubernetes, have become an integral part of production cloud environments. One of the principles in designing cloud-native applications is called Single Concern Principle, which suggests that each container ...