This paper studies the synergies between memory corruption vulnerabilities and speculative
execution vulnerabilities. We leverage speculative execution attacks to bypass an important …

Microarchitectural vulnerabilities, such as Meltdown and Spectre, exploit subtle
microarchitecture state to steal the user's secret data and even compromise the operating …

Modern Intel, AMD, and ARM processors translate complex instructions into simpler internal
micro-ops that are then cached in a dedicated on-chip structure called the micro-op cache …

Since the discovery of Spectre, a large number of hardware mechanisms for secure
speculation has been proposed. Intuitively, more defensive mechanisms are less efficient …

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

Computer architects employ a series of performance optimizations at the micro-architecture
level. These optimizations are meant to be invisible to the programmer but they are implicitly …

For over two decades, cache attacks have been shown to pose a significant risk to the
security of computer systems. In particular, a large number of works show that cache attacks …

Modern x86 processors have many prefetch instructions that can be used by programmers
to boost performance. However, these instructions may also cause security problems. In …

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

Speculative execution attacks put a dangerous new twist on information leakage through
microarchitectural side channels. Ordinarily, programmers can reason about leakage based …