doi.org
April 2019 • Christos Sakalis, Mehdi Alipour, Alberto Ros, Alexandra Jimborean, Stefanos Kaxiras, Magnus Själander
Speculative execution is necessary for achieving high performance on modern general-purpose CPUs but, starting with Spectre and Meltdown, it has also been proven to cause severe security flaws. In case of a misspeculation, the architectural state is restored to assure functional correctness but a multitude of microarchitectural changes (e.g., cache updates), caused by the speculatively executed instructions, are commonly left in the system. These changes can be used to leak sensitive information, which has led to …