Isolating Speculative Data to Prevent Transient Execution Attacks

Hardware security has recently re-surfaced as a first-order concern to the confidentiality protections of computing systems. Meltdown and Spectre introduced a new class of exploits that leverage transient state as an attack surface and have revealed fundamental security vulnerabilities of speculative execution in high-performance processors. These attacks derive benefit from the fact that programs may speculatively execute instructions outside their legal control flows. This insight is then utilized for gaining access to restricted data and exfiltrating it by means of a covert channel. This study presents a microarchitectural mitigation technique for shielding transient state from covert channels during speculative execution. Unlike prior work that has focused on closing individual covert channels used to leak sensitive information, this approach prevents the use of speculative data by downstream instructions until doing so is determined to be safe. This prevents transient execution attacks at a cost of 18 percent average performance degradation.