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2019•Unpublished venueOpen access

SafeSpec

Khaled N. Khasawneh, Esmaeil Mohammadian Koruyeh, Chengyu Song, Dmitry Evtyushkin, Dmitry Ponomarev, Nael Abu‐Ghazaleh

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Abstract

Speculative attacks, such as Spectre and Meltdown, target speculative execution to access privileged data and leak it through a side-channel. In this paper, we introduce (SafeSpec), a new model for supporting speculation in a way that is immune to the side-channel leakage by storing side effects of speculative instructions in separate structures until they commit. Additionally, we address the possibility of a covert channel from speculative instructions to committed instructions before these instructions are committed. We develop a cycle accurate model of modified design of an x86-64 processor and show that the performance impact is negligible.

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What this paper is about

Speculative attacks, such as Spectre and Meltdown, target speculative execution to access privileged data and leak it through a side-channel. In this paper, we introduce (SafeSpec), a new model for supporting speculation in a way that is immune to the side-channel leakage by storing side effects of speculative instructions in separate structures until they commit. Additionally, we address the possibility of a covert channel from speculative instructions to committed instructions before these instructions are committed. We develop a cycle accurate model of modified design of an x86-64 processor and show that the performance impact is negligible.

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OpenAlex reports 132 citations for this work. Citation counts describe recorded attention and do not establish research quality.

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Available abstract

Speculative attacks, such as Spectre and Meltdown, target speculative execution to access privileged data and leak it through a side-channel. In this paper, we introduce (SafeSpec), a new model for supporting speculation in a way that is immune to the side-channel leakage by storing side effects of speculative instructions in separate structures until they commit. Additionally, we address the possibility of a covert channel from speculative instructions to committed instructions before these instructions are committed. We develop a cycle accurate model of modified design of an x86-64 processor and show that the performance impact is negligible.

Key concepts: Speculative execution, Computer science, Commit, Side channel attack, Speculation, x86, Speculative multithreading, Computer security

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