Countermeasures Against Branch Target Buffer Attacks
Giovanni Agosta, Luca Breveglieri, Gerardo Pelosi, Israel Koren · 2007
Branch Prediction Analysis has been recently proposed as an attack method to extract the key from software implementations of the RSA public key cryptographic algorithm. In this paper, we describe several solutions to protect against such an attack and analyze their impact on the execution time of the cryptographic algorithm. We show that the code transformations required for protection against branch target buffer attacks can be automated and impose only a negligible performance penalty.