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SPEculative Execution side Channel Hardware (SPEECH) Vulnerabilities have enabled the notorious Meltdown, Spectre, and L1 terminal fault (L1TF) attacks. While a number of studies have reported different variants of SPEECH vulnerabilities,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-12-11 Yuan Xiao , Yinqian Zhang , Radu Teodorescu

We propose the concept of Speculative Execution for Visual Analytics and discuss its effectiveness for model exploration and optimization. Speculative Execution enables the automatic generation of alternative, competing model configurations…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2019-08-08 Fabian Sperrle , Jürgen Bernard , Michael Sedlmair , Daniel Keim , Mennatallah El-Assady

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

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

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-07-20 Hamed Nemati , Roberto Guanciale , Pablo Buiras , Andreas Lindner

We propose using reinforcement learning to address the challenges of discovering microarchitectural vulnerabilities, such as Spectre and Meltdown, which exploit subtle interactions in modern processors. Traditional methods like random…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-02-21 M. Caner Tol , Kemal Derya , Berk Sunar

The Spectre speculative side-channel attacks pose formidable threats for security. Research has shown that code following the cryptographic constant-time discipline can be efficiently protected against Spectre v1 using a selective variant…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Jonathan Baumann , Roberto Blanco , Léon Ducruet , Sebastian Harwig , Catalin Hritcu

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-10-02 Marco Guarnieri , Boris Köpf , Jan Reineke , Pepe Vila

Existing speculative execution attacks are limited to breaching confidentiality of data beyond privilege boundary, the so-called spectre-type attacks. All of them utilize the changes in microarchitectural buffers made by the speculative…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Zhi Zhang , Yueqiang Cheng , Surya Nepal

A new class of vulnerabilities related to speculative and out-of-order execution, fault-injection, and microarchitectural side channels rose to attention in 2018. The techniques behind the transient execution vulnerabilities were not new,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-09-08 Allison Randal

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

Transient Execution Attacks (TEAs) have gradually become a major security threat to modern high-performance processors. They exploit the vulnerability of speculative execution to illegally access private data, and transmit them through…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-04-18 Bowen Tang , Chenggang Wu , Pen-Chung Yew , Yinqian Zhang , Mengyao Xie , Yuanming Lai , Yan Kang , Wei Wang , Qiang Wei , Zhe Wang

The recent Spectre attacks exploit speculative execution, a pervasively used feature of modern microprocessors, to allow the exfiltration of sensitive data across protection boundaries. In this paper, we introduce a new Spectre-class attack…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-07-23 Esmaeil Mohammadian Koruyeh , Khaled Khasawneh , Chengyu Song , Nael Abu-Ghazaleh

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-12-14 Hernán Ponce-de-León , Johannes Kinder

The disclosure of the Spectre speculative-execution attacks in January 2018 has left a severe vulnerability that systems are still struggling with how to patch. The solutions that currently exist tend to have incomplete coverage, perform…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Sam Ainsworth , Timothy M. Jones

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-04-11 Sunjay Cauligi , Craig Disselkoen , Daniel Moghimi , Gilles Barthe , Deian Stefan

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

At the edge of modern cyber-physical systems, Micro-Controller Units (MCUs) are responsible for safety-critical sensing/actuation. However, MCU cost constraints rule out the usual security mechanisms of general-purpose computers. Thus,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-09-30 Adam Caulfield , Liam Tyler , Ivan De Oliveira Nunes

Speculative decoding (SD) has become a popular technique to accelerate Large Language Model (LLM) inference, yet its real-world effectiveness remains unclear as prior evaluations rely on research prototypes and unrealistically small batch…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Xiaoxuan Liu , Jiaxiang Yu , Jongseok Park , Ion Stoica , Alvin Cheung

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…