Levioso: Efficient Compiler-Informed Secure Speculation
Ali Hajiabadi, Archit Agarwal, Andreas Diavastos, Trevor E. Carlson · 2024
Spectre-type attacks have exposed a major class of vulnerabilities arising from speculative execution of instructions, the main performance enabler of modern CPUs. These attacks speculatively leak secrets that have been either speculatively loaded (seen in sand-boxed programs) or non-speculatively loaded (seen in constant-time programs). Various hardware-only defenses have been proposed to mitigate both speculative and non-speculative secrets via all potential transmission channels. However, limited program knowledge is exposed to the hardware and these solutions conservatively restrict the execution of all instructions that can potentially leak.