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Uppsala University Department of Information Technology

Seminars

See all upcoming seminars in LäsIT and seminar web pages at the homepage for the PhD studentseminars, TDB, Vi2, Theory and Applications Seminars (TAS) @ UpMARC., Department of Mathematics and The Stockholm Logic Seminar.

Half-time seminar
5 April
Pavlos Aimoniotis: Novel Speculative Defense Tactics for Enhanced Performance
Location: ÅNG 101127, Time: 10:15-12:00


External Reviewer: Parosh Abdulla

Abstract:
Speculative execution optimizes processor performance by executing instructions before it is legal to do so, introducing potential vulnerabilities. In these vulnerabilities, that leverage the speculative side-channel (known as Spectre attacks), a secret is improperly accessed and then leaked by passing it to a transmitter instruction. Several proposed defenses effectively close this security hole by either delaying the secret from being loaded from the memory, prohibiting the propagation of the value under speculation, or by delaying dependent transmitters (e.g., loads) from executing when fed with input derived from an earlier speculative load. All these solutions result in loss of memory-level parallelism, and as a consequence, significant performance degradation.

In this seminar, I will present ReCon and Doppelganger Loads, two novel approaches aiming to recover this lost performance introduced by speculative side-channel defenses. ReCon accelerates speculative defenses by identifying and allowing non-secret addresses to be accessed speculatively. Doppelganger Loads leverage an address predictor to enable the execution of speculative loads independently of secrets, thereby minimizing the impact on performance caused by restricted speculative execution.

See also the list of all upcoming seminars.

Internal seminars. Lecturers may be either internal or external.



Uppsala Universitet