Restricting Control Flow During Speculative Execution with Venkman

TL;DR

Venkman is a program transformation system that prevents Spectre attacks by aligning control flow targets, ensuring speculative execution cannot bypass protective instructions, all while maintaining shared hardware structures.

Contribution

Venkman introduces a novel code transformation technique that aligns control flow targets to prevent Spectre attacks without flushing shared branch prediction structures.

Findings

Venkman increases execution time by 3.47× on average.

Code size increases by 1.94× on average.

Spectre-resistant SFI incurs 2.42× space and 1.68× performance overhead.

Abstract

Side-channel attacks such as Spectre that utilize speculative execution to steal application secrets pose a significant threat to modern computing systems. While program transformations can mitigate some Spectre attacks, more advanced attacks can divert control flow speculatively to bypass these protective instructions, rendering existing defenses useless. In this paper, we present Venkman: a system that employs program transformation to completely thwart Spectre attacks that poison entries in the Branch Target Buffer (BTB) and the Return Stack Buffer (RSB). Venkman transforms code so that all valid targets of a control-flow transfer have an identical alignment in the virtual address space; it further transforms all branches to ensure that all entries added to the BTB and RSB are properly aligned. By transforming all code this way, Venkman ensures that, in any program wanting Spectre defenses, all control-flow transfers, including speculative ones, do not skip over protective instructions Venkman adds to the code segment to mitigate Spectre attacks. Unlike existing defenses, Venkman does not reduce sharing of the BTB and RSB and does not flush these structures, allowing safe sharing and reuse among programs while maintaining strong protection against Spectre attacks. We built a prototype of Venkman on an IBM POWER8 machine. Our evaluation on the SPEC benchmarks and selected applications shows that Venkman increases execution time to 3.47$\times$ on average and increases code size to 1.94$\times$ on average when it is used to ensure that fences are executed to mitigate Spectre attacks. Our evaluation also shows that Spectre-resistant Software Fault Isolation (SFI) built using Venkman incurs a geometric mean of 2.42$\times$ space overhead and 1.68$\times$ performance overhead.