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Speculative Execution Attacks and Hardware Defenses

Published: 15 November 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Speculative execution attacks like Spectre and Meltdown exploit hardware performance optimization features to illegally access a secret and then leak the secret to an unauthorized recipient. Many variants of speculative execution attacks (also called transient execution attacks) have been proposed in the last few years, and new ones are constantly being discovered. While software mitigations for some attacks have been proposed, they often cause very significant performance degradation. Hardware solutions are also being proposed actively by the research community, especially as these are attacks on hardware microarchitecture. In this talk, we identify the critical steps in a speculative attack, and the root cause of successful attacks. We define the concept of "security dependencies", which should be implemented to prevent data leaks and other security breaches. We propose a taxonomy of defense strategies and show how proposed hardware defenses fall under each defense strategy. We discuss security-performance tradeoffs, which can decrease the performance overhead while still preventing security breaches. We suggest design principles for future security-aware microarchitecture.

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  1. Speculative Execution Attacks and Hardware Defenses

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ASHES '21: Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Attacks and Solutions in Hardware Security
    November 2021
    123 pages
    ISBN:9781450386623
    DOI:10.1145/3474376
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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 15 November 2021

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    1. hardware defenses
    2. speculative execution attacks

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