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Speculative taint tracking (STT): a comprehensive protection for speculatively accessed data

Authors:

Josep Torrellas,

Christopher W. FletcherAuthors Info & Claims

Communications of the ACM, Volume 64, Issue 12

Pages 105 - 112

https://doi.org/10.1145/3491201

Published: 19 November 2021 Publication History

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Abstract

Speculative execution attacks present an enormous security threat, capable of reading arbitrary program data under malicious speculation, and later exfiltrating that data over microarchitectural covert channels. This paper proposes speculative taint tracking (STT), a high security and high performance hardware mechanism to block these attacks. The main idea is that it is safe to execute and selectively forward the results of speculative instructions that read secrets, as long as we can prove that the forwarded results do not reach potential covert channels. The technical core of the paper is a new abstraction to help identify all micro-architectural covert channels, and an architecture to quickly identify when a covert channel is no longer a threat. We further conduct a detailed formal analysis on the scheme in a companion document. When evaluated on SPEC06 workloads, STT incurs 8.5% or 14.5% performance overhead relative to an insecure machine.

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Cited By

Schmidbauer TWendzel SSuga YSakurai KDing XSako K(2022)SoKProceedings of the 2022 ACM on Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3488932.3517418(546-560)Online publication date: 30-May-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3488932.3517418
Guanciale RPaladi NVahidi A(2022)SoK: Confidential Quartet - Comparison of Platforms for Virtualization-Based Confidential Computing2022 IEEE International Symposium on Secure and Private Execution Environment Design (SEED)10.1109/SEED55351.2022.00017(109-120)Online publication date: Sep-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/SEED55351.2022.00017

Index Terms

Speculative taint tracking (STT): a comprehensive protection for speculatively accessed data
1. Security and privacy
  1. Security in hardware
    1. Hardware attacks and countermeasures
      1. Side-channel analysis and countermeasures

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Published In

cover image Communications of the ACM

Communications of the ACM Volume 64, Issue 12

December 2021

101 pages

ISSN:0001-0782

EISSN:1557-7317

DOI:10.1145/3502158

Editor:
Andrew A. Chien
Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY

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Copyright © 2021 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 19 November 2021

Published in CACM Volume 64, Issue 12

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Cited By

Schmidbauer TWendzel SSuga YSakurai KDing XSako K(2022)SoKProceedings of the 2022 ACM on Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3488932.3517418(546-560)Online publication date: 30-May-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3488932.3517418
Guanciale RPaladi NVahidi A(2022)SoK: Confidential Quartet - Comparison of Platforms for Virtualization-Based Confidential Computing2022 IEEE International Symposium on Secure and Private Execution Environment Design (SEED)10.1109/SEED55351.2022.00017(109-120)Online publication date: Sep-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/SEED55351.2022.00017

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