Communications of the ACM
Spectre Attacks: Exploiting Speculative Execution
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Modern processors use branch prediction and speculative execution to maximize performance. For example, if the destination of a branch depends on a memory value that is in the process of being read, CPUs will try to guess the destination and attempt to execute ahead. When the memory value finally arrives, the CPU either discards or commits the speculative computation. Speculative logic is unfaithful in how it executes, can access the victim's memory and registers, and can perform operations with measurable side effects.
Spectre attacks involve inducing a victim to speculatively perform operations that would not occur during correct program execution and which leak the victim's confidential information via a side channel to the adversary. This paper describes practical attacks that combine methodology from side-channel attacks, fault attacks, and return-oriented programming that can read arbitrary memory from the victim's process. More broadly, the paper shows that speculative execution implementations violate the security assumptions underpinning numerous software security mechanisms, such as operating system process separation, containerization, just-in-time (JIT) compilation, and countermeasures to cache timing and side-channel attacks. These attacks represent a serious threat to actual systems because vulnerable speculative execution capabilities are found in microprocessors from Intel, AMD, and ARM that are used in billions of devices.
Although makeshift processor-specific countermeasures are possible in some cases, sound solutions will require fixes to processor designs as well as updates to instruction set architectures (ISAs) to give hardware architects and software developers a common understanding as to what computation state CPU implementations are (and are not) permitted to leak.
1. Introduction
Computations performed by physical devices often leave observable side effects beyond the computation's nominal outputs. Side-channel attacks focus on exploiting these side effects to extract otherwise-unavailable secret information. Since their introduction in the late 90s,14 various physical effects such as power consumption have been leveraged to extract cryptographic keys as well as other secrets.13
External side-channel measurements can be used to extract secret information from complex devices such as PCs and mobile phones. However, because these devices often execute code from a potentially unknown origin, they face additional threats in the form of software-based attacks, which do not require external measurement equipment. Although some attacks exploit software logic errors, other software attacks leverage hardware properties to infer sensitive information. Attacks of the latter type include microarchitectural attacks exploiting cache timing3, 6, 17 and branch prediction history.1 Software-based techniques have also been used to induce computation errors, such as fault attacks that alter physical memory11 or internal CPU values.25
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