Switchpoline: A Software Mitigation for Spectre-BTB and Spectre-BHB on ARMv8
Lorenz Hetterich, Markus Bauer, Michael Schwarz, Christian Rossow · 2024
Spectre-BTB, also known as Spectre Variant 2, is often considered the most dangerous Spectre variant. While there are widely-deployed software workarounds on x86, such as Retpoline, there are no automated software workarounds for protecting generic userspace applications on ARMv8. Moreover, hardware solutions do not consider in-place mistraining or variants such as branch-history injection (Spectre-BHI), also known as Spectre-BHB.