Microarchitectural attacks typically rely on precise timing sources to uncover short-lived
secret-dependent activity in the processor. In response, many browsers and even CPU …

Modern * 86 processors feature many prefetch instructions that developers can use to
enhance performance. However, with some prefetch instructions, users can more directly …

Side-channel attacks pose serious threats to many security models, especially sandbox-
based browsers. While transient-execution side channels in out-of-order processors have …

After years of development, FPGAs finally made an appearance on multi-tenant cloud
servers in the late 2010s. Research in micro-architectural attacks has uncovered a variety of …

Hardware peripherals such as GPUs and FPGAs are commonly available in server-grade
computing to accelerate specific compute tasks, from database queries to machine learning …

In cloud computing environments, virtual machines (VMs) running on cloud servers are
vulnerable to shared cache attacks, such as Spectre and Foreshadow. By exploiting memory …

Cache side-channel attacks have been widely utilized as an intermediate step in some
comprehensive attacks. Eviction sets, especially the minimal eviction sets, are essential …

Obtaining proper eviction sets is crucial for the success of conflict-based cache side-channel
attacks. A minimal eviction set contains just enough addresses mapped to the target cache …

Modern CPUs feature many microarchitectural structures shared among users. Although
such resource sharing offers performance benefits, it also creates opportunities for side …

This dissertation brings together some of the defining trends of early 21st century computing—
cloud computing, heterogeneous computing, and the increasingly complex …