Fast, Robust and Accurate Detection of Cache-Based Spectre Attack Phases
Arash Pashrashid, Ali Hajiabadi, Trevor E. Carlson · 2022
Modern processors achieve high performance and efficiency by employing techniques such as speculative execution and sharing resources such as caches. However, recent attacks like Spectre and Meltdown exploit the speculative execution of modern processors to leak sensitive information from the system. Many mitigation strategies have been proposed to restrict the speculative execution of processors and protect potential side-channels. Currently, these techniques have shown a significant performance overhead. A solution that can detect memory leaks before the attacker has a chance to exploit them would allow the processor to reduce the performance overhead by enabling protections only when the system is at risk.