Related papers: Speculose: Analyzing the Security Implications of …
Modern processors use branch prediction and speculative execution to maximize performance. For example, if the destination of a branch depends on a memory value that is in the process of being read, CPUs will try guess the destination and…
CPU cache is a limited but crucial storage component in modern processors, whereas the cache timing side-channel may inadvertently leak information through the physically measurable timing variance. Speculative execution, an essential…
Speculative execution which is used pervasively in modern CPUs can leave side effects in the processor caches and other structures even when the speculated instructions do not commit and their direct effect is not visible. The recent…
Reasoning about correctness and security of software is increasingly difficult due to the complexity of modern microarchitectural features such as out-of-order execution. A class of security vulnerabilities termed Spectre that exploits side…
Speculative execution attacks leverage the speculative and out-of-order execution features in modern computer processors to access secret data or execute code that should not be executed. Secret information can then be leaked through a…
Attacks like Spectre abuse speculative execution, one of the key performance optimizations of modern CPUs. Recently, several testing tools have emerged to automatically detect speculative leaks in commercial (black-box) CPUs. However, the…
Recent security vulnerabilities that target speculative execution (e.g., Spectre) present a significant challenge for processor design. The highly publicized vulnerability uses speculative execution to learn victim secrets by changing cache…
Speculative execution is a hardware optimisation technique where a processor, while waiting on the completion of a computation required for an instruction, continues to execute later instructions based on a predicted value of the pending…
Speculative execution is an optimization technique that has been part of CPUs for over a decade. It predicts the outcome and target of branch instructions to avoid stalling the execution pipeline. However, until recently, the security…
Speculative attacks such as Spectre can leak secret information without being discovered by the operating system. Speculative execution vulnerabilities are finicky and deep in the sense that to exploit them, it requires intensive manual…
Transient execution attacks that exploit speculation have raised significant concerns in computer systems. Typically, branch predictors are leveraged to trigger mis-speculation in transient execution attacks. In this work, we demonstrate a…
Speculative execution techniques have been a cornerstone of modern processors to improve instruction-level parallelism. However, recent studies showed that this kind of techniques could be exploited by attackers to leak secret data via…
Spectre attacks disclosed in early 2018 expose data leakage scenarios via cache side channels. Specifically, speculatively executed paths due to branch mis-prediction may bring secret data into the cache which are then exposed via cache…
Existing speculative execution attacks are limited to breaching confidentiality of data beyond privilege boundary, the so-called spectre-type attacks. All of them utilize the changes in microarchitectural buffers made by the speculative…
The recent Spectre attacks have demonstrated that modern microarchitectural optimizations can make software insecure. These attacks use features like pipelining, out-of-order and speculation to extract information about the memory contents…
In the last two decades, the evolving cyber-threat landscape has brought to center stage the contentious tradeoffs between the security and performance of modern microprocessors. The guarantees provided by the hardware to ensure no…
Speculative execution enhances processor performance by predicting intermediate results and executing instructions based on these predictions. However, incorrect predictions can lead to security vulnerabilities, as speculative instructions…
Runahead execution is a continuously evolving microarchitectural technique for processor performance. This paper introduces the first transient execution attack on the runahead execution, called SPECRUN, which exploits the unresolved branch…
Modern out-of-order CPUs heavily rely on speculative execution for performance optimization, with branch prediction serving as a cornerstone to minimize stalls and maximize efficiency. Whenever shared branch prediction resources lack proper…
Spectre attacks exploit microprocessor speculative execution to read and transmit forbidden data outside the attacker's trust domain and sandbox. Recent hardware schemes allow potentially-unsafe speculative accesses but prevent the secret's…