Related papers: Revizor: Testing Black-box CPUs against Speculatio…

Speculative attacks are still an active threat today that, even if initially focused on the x86 platform, reach across all modern hardware architectures. RISC-V is a newly proposed open instruction set architecture that has seen traction…

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…

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…

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"…

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…

New speculation-based attacks that affect large numbers of modern systems are disclosed regularly. Currently, CPU vendors regularly fall back to heavy-handed mitigations like using barriers or enforcing strict programming guidelines…

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 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…

Modern processor advancements have introduced security risks, particularly in the form of microarchitectural timing attacks. High-profile attacks such as Meltdown and Spectre have revealed critical flaws, compromising the entire system's…

Spectre, Meltdown, and related attacks have demonstrated that kernels, hypervisors, trusted execution environments, and browsers are prone to information disclosure through micro-architectural weaknesses. However, it remains unclear as to…

This paper argues and shows that speculative vectorization, where a loop with rare or unknown memory dependencies are still vectorized, is fundamentally vulnerable and cannot be mitigated by existing defenses. We implement a simple proof of…

Since the discovery of Spectre, a large number of hardware mechanisms for secure speculation has been proposed. Intuitively, more defensive mechanisms are less efficient but can securely execute a larger class of programs, while more…

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…

To improve the overall performance of processors, computer architects use various performance optimization techniques in modern processors, such as speculative execution, branch prediction, and chaotic execution. Both now and in the future,…

We propose ProSpeCT, a generic formal processor model providing provably secure speculation for the constant-time policy. For constant-time programs under a non-speculative semantics, ProSpeCT guarantees that speculative and out-of-order…

CPUs are becoming more complex with every generation, at both the logical and the physical levels. This potentially leads to more logic bugs and electrical defects in CPUs being overlooked during testing, which causes data corruption or…

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…

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…

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…

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…