Melting the Flesh of PHP’s Memory Hardening

PMDangNull: Preventing use-After-Free for Persistent Memory Applications

Use-After-Free (UAF) remains one of the most critical security threats affecting C/C++ programs. Moreover, the cross-restart persistence semantics of persistent memory (PM) programming models significantly broaden the UAF attack surface. Existing DRAM-based protection schemes lack crash consistency guarantees, whereas...

MixSan: Enhancing Address-Based Memory Sanitizers with Fused Metadata and Hybrid Detection

During software testing, memory errors in C/C++ can silently corrupt the program state. Address-based memory sanitizers, while offering practical performance and compatibility, are fundamentally unable to distinguish spatial errors that skip redzones or temporal errors that occur after memory reuse. Moreover, their reu...

Uncovering Hidden Memory Costs for Garbage Collection

User Privacy Attacks through Self-Modifying Code Conflicts

This paper systematically analyze a set of x86 instructions that directly or indirectly invalidate instruction cache lines, revealing measurable timing asymmetries between cache hits and misses, and shows that these SMC-induced timing artifacts can be leveraged to mount high-resolution cache attacks that are both steal...

DDRop: Active Memory Interposer Attacks on Confidential VMs by Dropping DDR5 Writes

A Comprehensive Survey of Transient Execution Vulnerabilities: from Meltdown and Specter to Modern Variants

Meltdown and Specter exploit hardware vulnerabilities in modern processors. These vulnerabilities allow programs to steal data currently being processed on the computer. Although programs are typically not permitted to read data from other programs, a malicious program can exploit Meltdown and Specter to access secrets...