Micro-architectural attacks

Speculative execution attacks, such as the recent Spectre attacks, are a recent class of security threats that affect almost all modern processors (that is, millions of IT systems). These attacks exploit the hardware side-effects of a CPU optimization called speculative execution to break fundamental security assumptions on how programs are executed and to leak sensitive information.

Speculative execution attacks, like the recent Spectre attacks, exploit the persistent microarchitectural side-effects of speculatively executed instructions. These attacks affect all modern general-purpose CPUs and pose a serious threat against platforms with multiple tenants.

Understanding the timing behavior of modern CPUs is crucial for optimizing code and for ensuring timing-related security and safety properties. Unfortunately, the timing behavior of today’s high-performance processors depends on subtle and poorly documented details of their micro-architecture, which has triggered laborious efforts from researchers to build models of different components.