Yuan Xiao (The Ohio State University), Yinqian Zhang (The Ohio State University), Radu Teodorescu (The Ohio State University)

SPEculative Execution side Channel Hardware (SPEECH) Vulnerabilities have enabled the notorious Meltdown, Spectre, and L1 terminal fault (L1TF) attacks. While a number of studies have reported different variants of SPEECH vulnerabilities, they are still not well understood. This is primarily due to the lack of information about microprocessor implementation details that impact the timing and order of various micro-architectural events. Moreover, to date, there is no systematic approach to quantitatively measure SPEECH vulnerabilities on commodity processors.

This paper introduces SPEECHMINER, a software framework for exploring and measuring SPEECH vulnerabilities in an automated manner. SPEECHMINER empirically establishes the link between a novel two-phase fault handling model and the exploitability and speculation windows of SPEECH vulnerabilities. It enables testing of a comprehensive list of exception-triggering instructions under the same software framework, which leverages covert-channel techniques and differential tests to gain visibility into the micro-architectural state changes. We evaluated SPEECHMINER on 9 different processor types, examined 21 potential vulnerability variants, confirmed various known attacks, and identified several new variants.

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Vasilios Mavroudis (University College London), Karl Wüst (ETH Zurich), Aritra Dhar (ETH Zurich), Kari Kostiainen (ETH Zurich), Srdjan Capkun (ETH Zurich)

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NoJITsu: Locking Down JavaScript Engines

Taemin Park (University of California, Irvine), Karel Dhondt (imec-DistriNet, KU Leuven), David Gens (University of California, Irvine), Yeoul Na (University of California, Irvine), Stijn Volckaert (imec-DistriNet, KU Leuven), Michael Franz (University of California, Irvine, USA)

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Thang Hoang (University of South Florida), Jorge Guajardo (Robert Bosch Research and Technology Center), Attila Yavuz (University of South Florida)

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ABSynthe: Automatic Blackbox Side-channel Synthesis on Commodity Microarchitectures

Ben Gras (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Intel Corporation), Cristiano Giuffrida (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Michael Kurth (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Herbert Bos (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Kaveh Razavi (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

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