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arXiv · 2410.22555

Lost and Found in Speculation: Hybrid Speculative Vulnerability Detection

Mohamadreza Rostami·Shaza Zeitouni·Rahul Kande·Chen Chen·Pouya Mahmoody·Jeyavijayan·Rajendran·Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi
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Abstract

Microarchitectural attacks represent a challenging and persistent threat to modern processors, exploiting inherent design vulnerabilities in processors to leak sensitive information or compromise systems. Of particular concern is the susceptibility of Speculative Execution, a fundamental part of performance enhancement, to such attacks. We introduce Specure, a novel pre-silicon verification method composing hardware fuzzing with Information Flow Tracking (IFT) to address speculative execution leakages. Integrating IFT enables two significant and non-trivial enhancements over the existing fuzzing approaches: i) automatic detection of microarchitectural information leakages vulnerabilities without golden model and ii) a novel Leakage Path coverage metric for efficient vulnerability detection. Specure identifies previously overlooked speculative execution vulnerabilities on the RISC-V BOOM processor and explores the vulnerability search space 6.45x faster than existing fuzzing techniques. Moreover, Specure detected known vulnerabilities 20x faster.

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Mohamadreza Rostami, Shaza Zeitouni, Rahul Kande, Chen Chen, Pouya Mahmoody, Jeyavijayan, Rajendran, Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi. 2024-10-29. Lost and Found in Speculation: Hybrid Speculative Vulnerability Detection. https://doi.org/10.1145/3649329.3658469

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