GhostMinion: A Strictness-Ordered Cache System for Spectre Mitigation

Sam Ainsworth

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Out-of-order speculation, a technique ubiquitous since the early 1990s, remains a fundamental security flaw. Via attacks such as Spectre and Meltdown, an attacker can trick a victim, in an otherwise entirely correct program, into leaking its secrets through the effects of misspeculated execution, in a way that is entirely invisible to the programmer’s model. This has serious implications for application sandboxing and inter-process communication.

Designing efficient mitigations that preserve the performance of out-of-order execution has been a challenge. The speculation-hiding techniques in the literature have been shown to not close such channels comprehensively, allowing adversaries to redesign attacks. Strong, precise guarantees are necessary, but mitigations must achieve high performance to be adopted. We present Strictness Ordering, a new constraint system that shows how we can comprehensively eliminate transient side channel attacks, while still allowing complex speculation and data forwarding between speculative instructions. We then present GhostMinion, a cache modification built using a variety of new techniques designed to provide Strictness Order at only 2.5% overhead.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMICRO-54: 54th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture
Place of PublicationNew York, NY, United States
PublisherACM Association for Computing Machinery
Pages592-606
Number of pages15
ISBN (Electronic)9781450385572
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 17 Oct 2021
Event54th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture - Online, Athens, Greece
Duration: 18 Oct 202122 Oct 2022
https://www.microarch.org/micro54/index.php

Conference

Conference54th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture
Abbreviated titleMICRO 2021
Country/TerritoryGreece
CityAthens
Period18/10/2122/10/22
Internet address

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • Spectre
  • microarchitectural security
  • caches

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'GhostMinion: A Strictness-Ordered Cache System for Spectre Mitigation'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this