# Processor Hardware Security Vulnerabilities and their Detection by Unique Program Execution Checking

## TL;DR

This paper reveals that covert channel vulnerabilities are not limited to advanced speculative processors but also exist in common in-order pipelined processors, and introduces an automated method called Unique Program Execution Checking to detect these vulnerabilities systematically.

## Contribution

It demonstrates the presence of covert channel vulnerabilities in mainstream in-order processors and proposes a novel automated detection method for hardware security flaws.

## Key findings

- Covert channels exist in in-order pipelined processors.
- The proposed method systematically detects known and unknown vulnerabilities.
- Hardware security risks are broader than previously thought.

## Abstract

Recent discovery of security attacks in advanced processors, known as Spectre and Meltdown, has resulted in high public alertness about security of hardware. The root cause of these attacks is information leakage across "covert channels" that reveal secret data without any explicit information flow between the secret and the attacker. Many sources believe that such covert channels are intrinsic to highly advanced processor architectures based on speculation and out-of-order execution, suggesting that such security risks can be avoided by staying away from high-end processors. This paper, however, shows that the problem is of wider scope: we present new classes of covert channel attacks which are possible in average-complexity processors with in-order pipelining, as they are mainstream in applications ranging from Internet-of-Things to Autonomous Systems. We present a new approach as a foundation for remedy against covert channels: while all previous attacks were found by clever thinking of human attackers, this paper presents an automated and exhaustive method called "Unique Program Execution Checking" which detects and locates vulnerabilities to covert channels systematically, including those to covert channels unknown so far.