S4V: A Benchmark Suite of Transient Execution Attacks for RISC-V Processors
Elia Lazzeri, Matteo Colella, Gianluca Furano, Luca Cassano · 2025
Transient Execution Attacks (TEAs) exploit architectural optimizations in modern processors, such as out-of-order and speculative execution, to illicitly access sensitive data belonging to other processes or the operating system. While the RISC-V ISA has gained significant traction, its susceptibility to TEAs remains relatively unexplored. A major obstacle to in-depth security evaluation of RISC-V processors is the lack of readily accessible and comprehensive TEA implementations for these architectures. This paper introduces Security for RISC-V (S4V), a security benchmark suite comprising implementations of several recent TEAs specifically tailored for RISC-V processors. Beyond providing a template for each TEA implementation, we developed an instance of S4V for the Berkeley Out-of-Order Machine (BOOM) processor to demonstrate the feasibility of executing these attacks on a widely adopted and renowned RISCV core. S4V aims to facilitate security research in evaluating countermeasures and enabling a more thorough understanding of TEA vulnerabilities within the RISC-V ecosystem.