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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,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-04-24 Yu Jin , Pengfei Qiu , Chunlu Wang , Yihao Yang , Dongsheng Wang , Gang Qu

Side-channel attacks such as Spectre that utilize speculative execution to steal application secrets pose a significant threat to modern computing systems. While program transformations can mitigate some Spectre attacks, more advanced…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-03-27 Zhuojia Shen , Jie Zhou , Divya Ojha , John Criswell

Modern out-of-order processors face speculative execution attacks. Despite various proposed software and hardware mitigations to prevent such attacks, new attacks keep arising from unknown vulnerabilities. Thus, a formal and rigorous…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2024-07-18 Qinhan Tan , Yuheng Yang , Thomas Bourgeat , Sharad Malik , Mengjia Yan

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-08-18 Roberto Guanciale , Musard Balliu , Mads Dam

Speculative execution is crucial in enhancing modern processor performance but can introduce Spectre-type vulnerabilities that may leak sensitive information. Detecting Spectre gadgets from programs has been a research focus to enhance the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Fangzheng Lin , Zhongfa Wang , Hiroshi Sasaki

Whenever modern CPUs encounter a conditional branch for which the condition cannot be evaluated yet, they predict the likely branch target and speculatively execute code. Such pipelining is key to optimizing runtime performance and is…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-01-15 Giorgi Maisuradze , Christian Rossow

Recently discovered Spectre and meltdown attacks affects almost all processors by leaking confidential information to other processes through side-channel attacks. These vulnerabilities expose design flaws in the architecture of modern…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-06-03 Bilal Ali Ahmad

Modern microprocessors depend on speculative execution, creating vulnerabilities that enable transient execution attacks. Prior defenses target speculative data leakage but overlook false dependencies from partial address aliasing, where…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Gayathri Subramanian , Girinath P , Nitya Ranganathan , Kamakoti Veezhinathan , Gopalakrishnan Srinivasan

Analyzing the behavior of a program running on a processor that supports speculative execution is crucial for applications such as execution time estimation and side channel detection. Unfortunately, existing static analysis techniques…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2019-08-16 Meng Wu , Chao Wang

We present uSpectre, a new class of transient execution attacks that exploit microcode branch mispredictions to transiently leak sensitive data. We find that many long-known and recently-discovered transient execution attacks, which were…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Nicholas Mosier , Hamed Nemati , John C. Mitchell , Caroline Trippel

Spectre and Meltdown attacks and their variants exploit hardware performance optimization features to cause security breaches. Secret information is accessed and leaked through covert or side channels. New attack variants keep appearing and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-12-24 Zecheng He , Guangyuan Hu , Ruby Lee

Modern processors have suffered a deluge of threats exploiting branch instruction collisions inside the branch prediction unit (BPU), from eavesdropping on secret-related branch operations to triggering malicious speculative executions.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-04-22 Tao Zhang , Timothy Lesch , Kenneth Koltermann , Dmitry Evtyushkin

Spectre intrusions exploit speculative execution design vulnerabilities in modern processors. The attacks violate the principles of isolation in programs to gain unauthorized private user information. Current state-of-the-art detection…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-10-27 Chidera Biringa , Gaspard Baye , Gökhan Kul

Out-of-order speculation, a technique ubiquitous since the early 1990s, remains a fundamental security flaw. Via attacks such as Spectre and Meltdown, an attacker can trick a victim, in an otherwise entirely correct program, into leaking…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-09-10 Sam Ainsworth

Speculative side-channel attacks access sensitive data and use transmitters to leak the data during wrong-path execution. Various defenses have been proposed to prevent such information leakage. However, not all speculatively executed…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-12-05 Pavlos Aimoniotis , Christos Sakalis , Magnus Själander , Stefanos Kaxiras

The recent discovery of the Spectre and Meltdown attacks represents a watershed moment not just for the field of Computer Security, but also of Programming Languages. This paper explores speculative side-channel attacks and their…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2019-02-15 Ross Mcilroy , Jaroslav Sevcik , Tobias Tebbi , Ben L. Titzer , Toon Verwaest

The transient-execution attack Meltdown leaks sensitive information by transiently accessing inaccessible data during out-of-order execution. Although Meltdown is fixed in hardware for recent CPU generations, most currently-deployed CPUs…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-10-09 Daniel Weber , Fabian Thomas , Lukas Gerlach , Ruiyi Zhang , Michael Schwarz

Cache side channel attacks are increasingly alarming in modern processors due to the recent emergence of Spectre and Meltdown attacks. A typical attack performs intentional cache access and manipulates cache states to leak secrets by…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2024-05-16 Luyi Li , Jiayi Huang , Lang Feng , Zhongfeng Wang

Modern microarchitectures incorporate optimization techniques such as speculative loads and store forwarding to improve the memory bottleneck. The processor executes the load speculatively before the stores, and forwards the data of a…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-06-04 Saad Islam , Ahmad Moghimi , Ida Bruhns , Moritz Krebbel , Berk Gulmezoglu , Thomas Eisenbarth , Berk Sunar

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"…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-12-13 Mohammad Rahmani Fadiheh , Dominik Stoffel , Clark Barrett , Subhasish Mitra , Wolfgang Kunz