Transient execution attacks, also known as speculative execution attacks, have drawn much
interest in the last few years as they can cause critical data leakage. Since the first …

We propose leakage containment models (LCMs)---novel axiomatic security contracts which
support formally reasoning about the security guarantees of programs when they run on …

Due to the high cost of serializing instructions to mitigate Spectre-like attacks on
mispredicted conditional branches (Spectre-PHT), developers of critical software such as the …

The recent Spectre attacks have demonstrated the fundamental insecurity of current
computer microarchitecture. The attacks use features like pipelining, out-of-order and …

Spectre vulnerabilities violate our fundamental assumptions about architectural abstractions,
allowing attackers to steal sensitive data despite previously state-of-the-art …

Microarchitectural leakage models provide effective tools to prevent vulnerabilities such as
Spectre and Meltdown via secure co-design: For software, they provide a foundation for …

In this paper we revisit the Spectre v1 vulnerability and software-only countermeasures.
Specifically, we systematically investigate the performance penalty and security properties of …

Modern processors employ different speculation mechanisms to speculate over different
kinds of instructions. Attackers can exploit these mechanisms simultaneously in order to …

Speculative vulnerabilities such as Spectre and Meltdown expose speculative execution
state that can be exploited to leak information across security domains via side-channels …

Spectre are microarchitectural attacks which were made public in January 2018. They allow
an attacker to recover secrets by exploiting speculations. Detection of Spectre is particularly …