Zhenxiao Qi (UC Riverside), Qian Feng (Baidu USA), Yueqiang Cheng (NIO Security Research), Mengjia Yan (MIT), Peng Li (ByteDance), Heng Yin (UC Riverside), Tao Wei (Ant Group)

Software patching is a crucial mitigation approach against Spectre-type attacks. It utilizes serialization instructions to disable speculative execution of potential Spectre gadgets in a program. Unfortunately, there are no effective solutions to detect gadgets for Spectre-type attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel Spectre gadget detection technique by enabling dynamic taint analysis on speculative execution paths. To this end, we simulate and explore speculative execution at the system level (within a CPU emulator). We have implemented a prototype called SpecTaint to demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed approach. We evaluated SpecTaint on our Spectre Samples Dataset, and compared SpecTaint with existing state-of-the-art Spectre gadget detection approaches on real-world applications. Our experimental results demonstrate that SpecTaint outperforms existing methods with respect to detection precision and recall by large margins, and it also detects new Spectre gadgets in real-world applications such as Caffe and Brotli. Besides, SpecTaint significantly reduces the performance overhead after patching the detected gadgets, compared with other approaches.

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Jonathan Petit (Director Of Engineering at Qualcomm Technologies) Dr. Jonathan Petit is Director of Engineering at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., where he leads research in security of connected and automated vehicles (CAV). His team works on designing security solutions, but also develops tools for automotive penetration testing and builds prototypes. His recent work on misbehavior protection…

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Leonie Reichert and Samuel Brack (Humboldt University of Berlin); Björn Scheuermann (Humboldt-University of Berlin)

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