Declassiflow: A Static Analysis for Modeling Non-Speculative Knowledge to Relax Speculative Execution Security Measures
Rutvik Choudhary, Alan Wang, Zirui Neil Zhao, Adam Morrison, Christopher W. Fletcher · 2023
Speculative execution attacks undermine the security of constant-time programming, the standard technique used to prevent microarchitectural side channels in security-sensitive software such as cryptographic code. Constant-time code must therefore also deploy a defense against speculative execution attacks to prevent leakage of secret data stored in memory or the processor registers. Unfortunately, contemporary defenses, such as speculative load hardening (SLH), can only satisfy this strong security guarantee at a very high performance cost.