Related papers: "It's a Trap!"-How Speculation Invariance Can Be A…
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…
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…
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…
Practical attacks that exploit speculative execution can leak confidential information via microarchitectural side channels. The recently-demonstrated Spectre attacks leverage speculative loads which circumvent access checks to read…
Modern processors employ different prediction mechanisms to speculate over different kinds of instructions. Attackers can exploit these prediction mechanisms simultaneously in order to trigger leaks about speculatively-accessed data. Thus,…
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 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…
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…
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…
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 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 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…
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,…
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…
The prevalence of memory corruption bugs in the past decades resulted in numerous defenses, such as stack canaries, control flow integrity (CFI), and memory safe languages. These defenses can prevent entire classes of vulnerabilities, and…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Spectre v1 attacks, which exploit conditional branch misprediction, are often identified with attacks that bypass array bounds checking to leak data from a victim's memory. Generally, however, Spectre v1 attacks can exploit any conditional…