Position Paper: A case for exposing extra-architectural state in the ISA
Jason Lowe-Power, Venkatesh Akella, Matthew Farrens, Samuel Talmadge King, Christopher J. Nitta · 2018
The recent Meltdown and Spectre attacks took the community by surprise. Rather than exploiting an incorrect implementation of the ISA, these attacks leverage the undocumented implementation-specific speculation behavior of high-performance microarchitectures to affect the extra-architectural state of the machine (e.g., caches).