Related papers: Speculative Interference Attacks: Breaking Invisib…

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…

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…

Transient execution attacks, also called speculative execution attacks, have drawn much interest as they exploit the transient execution of instructions, e.g., during branch prediction, to leak data. Transient execution is fundamental to…

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…

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…

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 disclosure of the Spectre speculative-execution attacks in January 2018 has left a severe vulnerability that systems are still struggling with how to patch. The solutions that currently exist tend to have incomplete coverage, perform…

The Spectre family of speculative execution attacks have required a rethinking of formal methods for security. Approaches based on operational speculative semantics have made initial inroads towards finding vulnerable code and validating…

Caches have been exploited to leak secret information due to the different times they take to handle memory accesses. Cache timing attacks include non-speculative cache side and covert channel attacks and cache-based speculative execution…

The recent Spectre attacks exploit speculative execution, a pervasively used feature of modern microprocessors, to allow the exfiltration of sensitive data across protection boundaries. In this paper, we introduce a new Spectre-class attack…

Since the advent of SPECTRE, a number of countermeasures have been proposed and deployed. Rigorously reasoning about their effectiveness, however, requires a well-defined notion of security against speculative execution attacks, which has…

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…

The recent Spectre attacks has demonstrated the fundamental insecurity of current computer microarchitecture. The attacks use features like pipelining, out-of-order and speculation to extract arbitrary information about the memory contents…

Spectre attacks and their many subsequent variants are a new vulnerability class affecting modern CPUs. The attacks rely on the ability to misguide speculative execution, generally by exploiting the branch prediction structures, to execute…

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…

Spectre attacks exploit speculative execution to leak sensitive information. In the last few years, a number of static side-channel detectors have been proposed to detect cache leakage in the presence of speculative execution. However,…

This paper presents SgxPectre Attacks that exploit the recently disclosed CPU bugs to subvert the confidentiality and integrity of SGX enclaves. Particularly, we show that when branch prediction of the enclave code can be influenced by…

Microarchitectural attacks represent a challenging and persistent threat to modern processors, exploiting inherent design vulnerabilities in processors to leak sensitive information or compromise systems. Of particular concern is the…

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…

The Spectre vulnerability in modern processors has been widely reported. The key insight in this vulnerability is that speculative execution in processors can be misused to access the secrets. Subsequently, even though the speculatively…