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6 March 2020
Abstract:Modern high-performance CPUs depend on speculative out-of-order execution in order to offer high performance while also remaining energy efficient. However, with the introduction of Meltdown and Spectre in the beginning of 2018, speculative execution has been under attack. These attacks, and the many that followed, take advantage of the unchecked nature of speculative execution and the microarchitectural changes it causes in order to mount speculative side-channel attacks. Such attacks can bypass software and hardware barriers and gain access to sensitive information while remaining invisible to the application.
In this thesis we will describe our work on preventing speculative side-channel attacks that exploit the memory hierarchy as their side-channel. Specifically, we will discuss two different approaches, one that does not restrict speculative execution but tries to keep its microarchitectural side-effects hidden, and one where we delay speculative memory accesses if we determine that they might lead to information leakage. We will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches, compare them against other state-of-the-art solutions, and show that it is possible to achieve secure, invisible speculation while at the same time maintaining high performance and efficiency.
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