ShadowLoad: Injecting State into Hardware Prefetchers
Lorenz Hetterich, Fabian Thomas, L. O. Gerlach, Ruiyi Zhang, Nils Bernsdorf, Eduard Ebert, Michael Schwarz · 2025
Hardware prefetchers are an optimization in modern CPUs that predict memory accesses and preemptively load the corresponding value into the cache. Previous work showed that the internal state of hardware prefetchers can act as a side channel, leaking information across security boundaries such as processes, user and kernel space, and even trusted execution environments.