Microarchitectural Side-Channel Threats, Weaknesses and Mitigations: A Systematic Mapping Study

Abstract

Over the course of recent years, microarchitectural side-channel attacks emerged as one of the most novel and thought-provoking attacks to exfiltrate information from computing hardware. These attacks leverage the unintended artefacts produced as side-effects to certain architectural design choices and proved difficult to be effectively mitigated without incurring significant performance penalties. In this work, we undertake a systematic mapping study of the academic literature related to the aforementioned attacks. We, in particular, pose four research questions and study 104 primary works to answer those questions. We inquire about the origins of artefacts leading up to exploitable settings of microarchitectural side-channel attacks; the effectiveness of the proposed countermeasures; and the lessons to be learned that would help build secure systems for the future. Furthermore, we propose a classification scheme that would also serve in the future for systematic mapping efforts in this scope.