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We present Janus, a compiler-based security framework that mitigates transient execution attacks like Spectre and control-flow hijacking on ARM64 platforms. Janus integrates speculative execution and control flow dependencies with PA…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Ciyan Ouyang , Peinan Li , Yubiao Huang , Dan Meng , Rui Hou

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.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-05-23 Michael Schwarz , Robert Schilling , Florian Kargl , Moritz Lipp , Claudio Canella , Daniel Gruss

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…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Chaoqun Shen , Gang Qu , Jiliang Zhang

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-06-19 Khaled N. Khasawneh , Esmaeil Mohammadian Koruyeh , Chengyu Song , Dmitry Evtyushkin , Dmitry Ponomarev , Nael Abu-Ghazaleh

Speculative execution attacks undermine the security of constant-time programming, the standard technique used to prevent microarchitectural side channels in security-sensitive software such as cryptographic code. Constant-time code must…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-12-18 Rutvik Choudhary , Alan Wang , Zirui Neil Zhao , Adam Morrison , Christopher W. Fletcher

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

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

Speculation is key to achieving high CPU performance, yet it enables risks like Spectre attacks which remain a significant challenge to mitigate without incurring substantial performance overheads. These attacks typically unfold in three…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-05-09 Hossam ElAtali , N. Asokan

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

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…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Conor Green , Cole Nelson , Mithuna Thottethodi , T. N. Vijaykumar

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-04-23 Guangyuan Hu , Ruby B. Lee

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-05-26 Guanhua Wang , Sudipta Chattopadhyay , Arnab Kumar Biswas , Tulika Mitra , Abhik Roychoudhury

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-12-06 Esmaeil Mohammadian Koruyeh , Shirin Haji Amin Shirazi , Khaled N. Khasawneh , Chengyu Song , Nael Abu-Ghazaleh

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…

This paper introduces Okapi, a new hardware/software cross-layer architecture designed to mitigate Transient Execution Side Channel attacks, including Spectre variants, in modern computing systems. Okapi provides a hardware basis for secure…

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

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-08-14 Lesly-Ann Daniel , Marton Bognar , Job Noorman , Sébastien Bardin , Tamara Rezk , Frank Piessens

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Xaver Fabian , Marco Guarnieri , Boris Köpf , Jose F. Morales , Marco Patrignani , Jan Reineke , Andres Sanchez

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

Over the past few years, several research groups have introduced innovative hardware designs for Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), aiming to secure applications against potentially compromised privileged software, including the kernel.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Gwenn Le Gonidec , Maria Méndez Real , Guillaume Bouffard , Jean-Christophe Prévotet