Side channel attacks such as Spectre or Meltdown allow data leakage from an unwilling process. Until now, transient execution side channel attacks primarily leveraged cache-based side channels to leak information. The very purpose of a cache, that of providing faster access to a subset of data, enables information leakage. While …
read moreMilkomeda: colliding galaxies or how to repurpose security checks across domains
On one hand, GPUs expose broad functionality for graphics and machine learning workloads, on the other hand, this functionality may be exploited due to large amounts of unvetted code, complex functionality, and the information gap between user-space application, kernel, and the auxiliary GPU. We introduce a novel framework that allows …
read moreAutomating data-only attacks through Block Oriented Programming (BOP)
With the rise of strong control-flow defenses such as Control-Flow Integrity (CFI), attackers will increasingly resort to data-only attacks that can be equally powerful. Earlier research demonstrated that data-only attacks can be as devastating as control-flow hijacking attacks. So far, constructing data-only attacks was cumbersome and required deep manual analysis …
read moreA journey on evaluating Control-Flow Integrity (CFI): LLVM-CFI versus RAP
This post started out of the need to provide a little more clarification after a long and heated discussions on Twitter (initial discussion and follow up) about the origins of Control-Flow Integrity (CFI), the contributions of academia, and the precision, performance, and compatibility of different existing implementations.
CFI is a …
read moreHow not to alienate your reviewers, aka writing a decent rebuttal
Assuming you have given everything to write the best and most beautiful paper you can ever create, it is obvious that the reviewers must see your points and therefore write you a favorable review with a recommendation of strong accept. Unfortunately, this is not always the case and reviewers may …
read moreNSF TTP Proposal: Prototype Shepherding
After serious advertising of the NSF TTP program at several conferences throughout last year, I've decided to submit to the NSF TTP program last fall. The NSF TTP program is supposed to help transition research into practice, either by forming a company to commercialize a prototype or by developing a …
read moreThe PC Experience
Program Committee (PC) meetings are this mysterious event where the fate of our research projects is decided based on a review of our paper submission. Especially for beginning researchers (i.e., PhD students) it is unclear how the evaluation and review process actually works. From a student's perspective, a paper …
read moreRaising the BAR at NDSS 2018
Just like every year, this year's NDSS was mid February in sunny (but not too warm) San Diego. To help cure the minimal 3 hour jetlag, I enjoyed a couple of morning runs with some of my colleagues -- if you want to get a workout done at a security conference …
read moreRoundtable on rigor in experimentation
This year at CSET yours truly had the pleasure to organize a round table on rigor in experimentation with Geoff Voelker, Micah Sherr, and Adam Doupé as panelists. After a quick introduction and mission statements we discussed rigor in experimentation along several dimensions. The most interesting aspects were open source …
read moreMitigations: Completeness/Effectiveness vs Performance
As part of ESSoS ‘17 we have organized a joint ESSoS/DIMVA panel on exploit mitigations, discussing the past, present, and future of mitigations. If we look at the statistics of reported memory corruptions we see an upward trend in number of reported vulnerabilities. Given the success of contests such …
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