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Survey on Architectural Attacks: A Unified Classification and Attack Model

According to the World Economic Forum, cyber attacks are considered as one of the most important sources of risk to companies and institutions worldwide. Attacks can target the network, software, and/or hardware. During the past years, much knowledge has been developed to understand and mitigate cyberattacks. However, new threats have appeared in recent years regarding software attacks that exploit hardware vulnerabilities. We define these attacks as architectural attacks. Today, both industry and academy have only limited comprehension of architectural attacks, which represents a critical issue for the design of future systems. To this end, this work proposes a new taxonomy, a new attack model, and a complete survey of existing architectural attacks. As a result, our study provides the tools to understand the Architectural Attacks deeply and start building better designs as well as protection mechanisms.