Systematic Analysis of Programming Languages and Their Execution Environments for Spectre Attacks

TL;DR

This paper systematically examines programming languages and execution environments for Spectre vulnerabilities, revealing many are unprotected and demonstrating new attack vectors across multiple languages and environments.

Contribution

It introduces Speconnector, a novel tool for developing Spectre proof-of-concept attacks, and provides a comprehensive analysis of security mitigations across various languages and environments.

Findings

Only 16 out of 42 environments have mitigations against Spectre.

Developed Spectre attacks in 8 programming languages and 11 environments.

Many security-critical languages remain unprotected three years after Spectre discovery.

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the security of programming languages and their execution environments (compilers and interpreters) with respect to Spectre attacks. The analysis shows that only 16 out of 42 execution environments have mitigations against at least one Spectre variant, i.e., 26 have no mitigations against any Spectre variant. Using our novel tool Speconnector, we develop Spectre proof-of-concept attacks in 8 programming languages and on code generated by 11 execution environments that were previously not known to be affected. Our results highlight some programming languages that are used to implement security-critical code, but remain entirely unprotected, even three years after the discovery of Spectre.