ReCon: Efficient Detection, Management, and Use of Non-Speculative Information Leakage
Pavlos Aimoniotis, Amund Bergland Kvalsvik, Xiaoyue Chen, Magnus Själander, Stefanos Kaxiras · 2023
In a speculative side-channel attack, a secret is improperly accessed and then leaked by passing it to a transmitter instruction. Several proposed defenses effectively close this security hole by either delaying the secret from being loaded or propagated, or by delaying dependent transmitters (e.g., loads) from executing when fed with tainted input derived from an earlier speculative load. This results in a loss of memory-level parallelism and performance.