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.

View More Papers

MACAO: A Maliciously-Secure and Client-Efficient Active ORAM Framework

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

Read More

Precisely Characterizing Security Impact in a Flood of Patches...

Qiushi Wu (University of Minnesota), Yang He (University of Minnesota), Stephen McCamant (University of Minnesota), Kangjie Lu (University of Minnesota)

Read More

EASI: Edge-Based Sender Identification on Resource-Constrained Platforms for Automotive...

Marcel Kneib (Robert Bosch GmbH), Oleg Schell (Bosch Engineering GmbH), Christopher Huth (Robert Bosch GmbH)

Read More

OcuLock: Exploring Human Visual System for Authentication in Virtual...

Shiqing Luo (Georgia State University), Anh Nguyen (Georgia State University), Chen Song (San Diego State University), Feng Lin (Zhejiang University), Wenyao Xu (SUNY Buffalo), Zhisheng Yan (Georgia State University)

Read More