SafeSpec: Banishing the Spectre of a Meltdown with Leakage-Free Speculation
Khaled N. Khasawneh, Esmaeil Mohammadian Koruyeh, Chengyu Song, Dmitry, Evtyushkin, Dmitry Ponomarev, Nael Abu-Ghazaleh

TL;DR
SafeSpec introduces a novel hardware approach that isolates speculative execution side effects, effectively preventing Spectre and Meltdown attacks without significant performance overhead.
Contribution
The paper presents SafeSpec, a new model for speculative execution that prevents side-channel leaks by isolating speculative state, addressing vulnerabilities exploited by Spectre and Meltdown.
Findings
SafeSpec prevents all variants of Spectre and Meltdown attacks.
The performance impact of SafeSpec is negligible in a cycle-accurate model.
Hardware prototypes show minimal overhead for SafeSpec implementation.
Abstract
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 Meltdown and Spectre attacks have shown that this behavior can be exploited to expose privileged information to an unprivileged attacker. In particular, the attack forces the speculative execution of a code gadget that will carry out the illegal read, which eventually gets squashed, but which leaves a side-channel trail that can be used by the attacker to infer the value. Several attack variations are possible, allowing arbitrary exposure of the full kernel memory to an unprivileged attacker. In this paper, we introduce a new model (SafeSpec) for supporting speculation in a way that is immune to side-channel leakage necessary for attacks such as Meltdown…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSecurity and Verification in Computing · Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques · Radiation Effects in Electronics
