MeltdownPrime and SpectrePrime: Automatically-Synthesized Attacks Exploiting Invalidation-Based Coherence Protocols

Created by : Francis Goodwin View profile

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Feb. 11, 2018 (arXrv.org) -- The recent Meltdown and Spectre attacks highlight the importance of automated verification techniques for identifying hardware security vulnerabilities.

We have developed a tool for synthesizing microarchitecture-specific programs capable of producing any user-specified hardware execution pattern of interest. Our tool takes two inputs: a formal description of (i) a microarchitecture in a domain-specific language, and (ii) a microarchitectural execution pattern of interest, e.g. a threat pattern. All programs synthesized by our tool are capable of producing the specified execution pattern on the supplied microarchitecture.