Ghostbusting
Ira Ray Jenkins, Prashant Anantharaman, Rebecca Shapiro, J. Peter Brady, Sergey Bratus, Sean W. Smith · 2020
Spectre attacks have drawn much attention since their announcement. Speculative execution creates so-called transient instructions, those whose results are ephemeral and not committed architecturally. However, various side-channels exist to extract these transient results from the microarchitecture, e.g., caches. Spectre Variant 1, the so-called Bounds Check Bypass, was the first such attack to be demonstrated. Leveraging transient read instructions and cache-timing effects, the adversary can read secret data.