Related papers: Do You Even Lift? Strengthening Compiler Security …

Attackers can access sensitive information of programs by exploiting the side-effects of speculatively-executed instructions using Spectre attacks. To mitigate theses attacks, popular compilers deployed a wide range of countermeasures. The…

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,…

Spectre vulnerabilities violate our fundamental assumptions about architectural abstractions, allowing attackers to steal sensitive data despite previously state-of-the-art countermeasures. To defend against Spectre, developers of…

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…

Secure compilation prevents all low-level attacks on compiled code and allows for sound reasoning about security in the source language. In this work we propose a new attacker model for secure compilation that extends the well-known notion…

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…

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…

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…

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…

We propose a new formal criterion for secure compilation, providing strong security guarantees for components written in unsafe, low-level languages with C-style undefined behavior. Our criterion goes beyond recent proposals, which protect…

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…

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…

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…

Secure compilers generate compiled code that withstands many target-level attacks such as alteration of control flow, data leaks or memory corruption. Many existing secure compilers are proven to be fully abstract, meaning that they reflect…

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…

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…

We propose a new formal criterion for evaluating secure compilation schemes for unsafe languages, expressing end-to-end security guarantees for software components that may become compromised after encountering undefined behavior---for…

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…

In recent years, several hardware-based countermeasures proposed to mitigate Spectre attacks have been shown to be insecure. To enable the development of effective secure speculation countermeasures, we need easy-to-use tools that can…

Recent research has revealed an ever-growing class of microarchitectural attacks that exploit speculative execution, a standard feature in modern processors. Proposed and deployed countermeasures involve a variety of compiler updates,…