Transient execution attacks, also known as speculative execution attacks, have drawn much
interest in the last few years as they can cause critical data leakage. Since the first …

Speculative execution attacks present an enormous security threat, capable of reading
arbitrary program data under malicious speculation, and later exfiltrating that data over …

Speculative execution attacks like Meltdown and Spectre work by accessing secret data in
wrong-path execution. Secrets are then transmitted and recovered by the attacker via a …

Speculation-based attacks affect hundreds of millions of computers. These attacks typically
exploit caches to leak information, using speculative instructions to cause changes to the …

Modern processors allow attackers to leak data during transient (ie, mis-speculated)
execution through microarchitectural covert timing channels. While initial defenses were …

Modern Intel, AMD, and ARM processors translate complex instructions into simpler internal
micro-ops that are then cached in a dedicated on-chip structure called the micro-op cache …

Since the discovery of Spectre, a large number of hardware mechanisms for secure
speculation has been proposed. Intuitively, more defensive mechanisms are less efficient …

The disclosure of the Spectre speculative-execution attacks in January 2018 has left a
severe vulnerability that systems are still struggling with how to patch. The solutions that …

Recent security vulnerabilities that target speculative execution (eg, Spectre) present a
significant challenge for processor design. These highly publicized vulnerabilities use …

Computer architects employ a series of performance optimizations at the micro-architecture
level. These optimizations are meant to be invisible to the programmer but they are implicitly …