Performance evolution of mitigating transient execution attacks
Jonathan Behrens, Adam Belay, M. Frans Kaashoek · 2022
Today's applications pay a performance penalty for mitigations to protect against transient execution attacks such as Meltdown [32] and Spectre [25]. Such a reduction in performance directly translates to higher operating costs and degraded user experience. This paper measures the performance impact of these mitigations across a range of processors from multiple vendors and across several security boundaries to identify trends over successive generations of processors and to attribute how much of the overall slowdown is caused by each individual mitigation.