Related papers: ret2spec: Speculative Execution Using Return Stack…
This paper introduces Triosecuris, a formally verified defense against Spectre BTB, RSB, and PHT that combines CET-style hardware-assisted control-flow integrity with compiler-inserted speculative load hardening (SLH). Triosecuris is based…
Branch misprediction latency is one of the most important contributors to performance degradation and wasted energy consumption in a modern core. State-of-the-art predictors generally perform very well but occasionally suffer from high…
SpecFuzz is the first tool that enables dynamic testing for speculative execution vulnerabilities (e.g., Spectre). The key is a novel concept of speculation exposure: The program is instrumented to simulate speculative execution in software…
Major chip manufacturers have all introduced Multithreaded processors. These processors are used for running a variety of workloads. Efficient resource utilization is an important design aspect in such processors. Depending on the workload,…
Recent work has shown that out-of-order and speculative execution mechanisms used to increase performance in the majority of processors expose the processors to critical attacks. These attacks, called Meltdown and Spectre, exploit the side…
The transient execution attack is a type of attack leveraging the vulnerability of modern CPU optimization technologies. New attacks surface rapidly. The side-channel is a key part of transient execution attacks to leak data. In this work,…
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 vulnerabilities such as Spectre and Meltdown expose speculative execution state that can be exploited to leak information across security domains via side-channels. Such vulnerabilities often stay undetected for a long time as…
Meltdown and Spectre exploit microarchitectural changes the CPU makes during transient out-of-order execution. Using side-channel techniques, these attacks enable leaking arbitrary data from memory. As state-of-the-art software mitigations…
Recent discovery of security attacks in advanced processors, known as Spectre and Meltdown, has resulted in high public alertness about security of hardware. The root cause of these attacks is information leakage across "covert channels"…
Research on transient execution attacks including Spectre and Meltdown showed that exception or branch misprediction events might leave secret-dependent traces in the CPU's microarchitectural state. This observation led to a proliferation…
Task-based programming models have demonstrated their efficiency in the development of scientific applications on modern high-performance platforms. They allow delegation of the management of parallelization to the runtime system (RS),…
Transient Execution Attacks (TEAs) have gradually become a major security threat to modern high-performance processors. They exploit the vulnerability of speculative execution to illegally access private data, and transmit them through…
This work unifies insights from the systems and functional programming communities, in order to enable compositional reasoning about software which is nonetheless efficiently realizable in hardware. It exploits a correspondence between…
Out-of-order execution and speculative execution are among the biggest contributors to performance and efficiency of modern processors. However, they are inconsiderate, leaking secret data during the transient execution of instructions.…
Fluid Stochastic Petri Nets are used to capture the dynamic behavior of an ILP processor, and discrete-event simulation is applied to assess the performance potential of predictions and speculative execution in boosting the performance of…
We address the problem of preserving non-interference across compiler transformations under speculative semantics. We develop a proof method that ensures the preservation uniformly across all source programs. The basis of our proof method…
Side-channel attacks are a security exploit that take advantage of information leakage. They use measurement and analysis of physical parameters to reverse engineer and extract secrets from a system. Power analysis attacks in particular,…
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 previously been blamed for vulnerabilities such as Spectre and…
Secure speculation schemes have shown great promise in the war against speculative side-channel attacks, and will be a key building block for developing secure, high-performance architectures moving forward. As the field matures, the need…