Retpoline Technique for Mitigating Spectre Attack

Kadir, Mohd Fadzil Abdul; Wong, Jin Kee; Wahab, Fauziah Ab; Bharun, Ahmad Faisal Amri Abidin; Mohamed, Mohamad Afendee; Zakaria, Aznida Hayati

doi:10.1109/iceee2019.2019.00026

Cited by 6 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…On the other hand, one software mitigation to Spectre-like attacks, which introduces a minimal overhead, is the retpoline [1]. It is a software construct that ensures that if the CPU is mispeculating due to some attack being carried out against some branch prediction unit, then the pipeline will be filled with an infinite loop.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To reduce the impact of attacks that exploit cache side channels, especially those based on CPU transient execution-namely to reduce the amount of information that an attacker can leak -several mitigation strategies have been proposed, both at the software and at the hardware level. The most notable ones are Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) [18], retpolines [1], swapgs fences, or PCID. Notably, some of these patches (e.g., KPTI) induce a non-negligible performance drop under specific workloads, which has been estimated as high as 30% [21].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our detection mechanism and the mitigations mentioned above have been implemented at kernel-level in Linux and have been exercised on multiple processors of the x86 family. We have used our patched kernel for a month, also in daily usage 1 -the patched kernel has also been used while typesetting this paper. No false-negative has been observed under that daily usage workload.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Fight Hardware with Hardware: Systemwide Detection and Mitigation of Side-channel Attacks Using Performance Counters

et al. 2023

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We present a kernel-level infrastructure that allows system-wide detection of malicious applications attempting to exploit cache-based side-channel attacks to break the process confinement enforced by standard operating systems. This infrastructure relies on hardware performance counters to collect information at runtime from all applications running on the machine. High-level detection metrics are derived from these measurements to maximize the likelihood of promptly detecting a malicious application. Our experimental assessment shows that we can catch a large family of side-channel attacks with a significantly reduced overhead. We also discuss countermeasures that can be enacted once a process is suspected of carrying out a side-channel attack to increase the overall tradeoff between the system’s security level and the delivered performance under non-suspected process executions.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Fight Hardware with Hardware: Systemwide Detection and Mitigation of Side-channel Attacks Using Performance Counters

et al. 2023

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“…After several previous studies which demonstrated the antiinflammatory capabilities of Haruan, the role of Haruan in osteoarthritis has been extensively explored [152][153][154]. Few scientific reports on the efficacy of Haruan in osteoarthritic patients revealed promising outcomes where Haruan was shown to be superior in reducing inflammatory changes in the synovial membrane, improving the pain, symptoms and quality of life of osteoarthritic sufferers while maintaining the structure of the cartilage of the control group [155][156][157][158][159]. As osteoarthritis is a common complication of major traumatic wound injury, which necessitates skin grafting owing to the disfigurement and disabling condition, oral administration of Haruan can exert a double action, improving both wound healing and osteoarthritis.…”

Section: Other Usages Of Haruanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Skin Grafts for Successful Wound Closure

2022

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tal (LTMGH), India, is presently a consultant general surgeon in Mumbai, India. Her areas of interest are burns, non-burn trauma and wounds, and venous diseases. An acknowledged teacher and sought-after speaker, Dr. Gore established the first cadaver skin bank in India. She is an avid researcher and has been the chief investigator for more than twenty-five national and international clinical trials. She has more than seventy-five publications in national and international journals to her credit and has contributed seventeen chapters to various books. She has been honored with several awards, prizes, scholarships, and orations for her contribution to the fields of her special interest. XIII Contents Preface Section 1 Wound Bed PreparationChapter 1 PrefaceWounds are common injuries that almost every human being experiences. They can vary in depth of tissue damage, etiology, location, contamination, lymphovascular integrity, and sensory neural function. They can be associated with diabetes, cardiovascular morbidity, hepatic and/or renal dysfunction, immunological status, malignancy, nutritional deficiencies, and so on. Wound healing is dependent on all these factors and many more.Wounds that are limited to the epidermis and superficial layers of the dermis generally close and heal naturally. We now know the stages in this process and understand the role of multiple mediators, growth factors, cellular contributions, and the interaction between these components. However, there is no method by which we can control or modify this natural process of wound healing.The situation is different when the wound involves full-thickness skin loss with or without loss of subcutaneous and deeper tissue. These wounds cannot achieve closure naturally, as both epidermal and dermal elements are lost. Without intervention, these wounds may remain as chronic, non-healing ulcers or they may close via wound contraction and formation of scar tissue causing functional limitations, deformities, and disfigurement. These scars may be unstable, leading to repeated breakdown, and are likely to develop Marjolin's ulcer, which is most often a squamous cell carcinoma of aggressive nature. Hence, a general recommendation is that wounds that do not close or that are not likely to close within 3-4 weeks of occurrence should be closed surgically with skin grafting or fasciocutaneous or myocutaneous flaps. This book, Skin Grafts for Successful Wound Closure, focuses on various aspects related to free skin grafts; it does not address flaps. Skin autografts are necessary for providing permanent wound closure. While harvesting a split-thickness skin autograft from the appropriate donor area on the body of the patient, the surgeon is creating a partialthickness wound that needs care for healing. Justifying this new wound and the pain and scarring associated with its healing requires a successful skin graft. Optimal preparation of the recipient wound bed is essential for the success of the graft take.Section I, "Wound Bed Preparation," includes three chapters...

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“…STIBP provides sibling thread protection on processors that require sibling indirect branch prediction protection. "Return trampoline" or "Retpolines" [31,44] isolates indirect branches from speculative execution. It uses properties of the Return Stack Buffer (RSB) as a prediction structure to control speculation through an infinite loop which is never executed to prevent the CPU from speculating on the target of an indirect jump.…”

Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Study of Mitigation Methods for Speculative Cache Side Channel Attacks

Mosquera Ferrandiz

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Side channels give attackers the opportunity to reveal private information without accessing it directly. In this study, several novel approaches are presented to mitigate cache side channel attacks including Spectre attack and its variants, resulting in several contributions. CHASM shows the information leakage in several new cache mapping schemes, where different cache address mappings may provide higher or lower protection against cache side channel attacks. GuardCache creates a noisy cache side-channel, making it more difficult for the attacker to determine if an access is a hit or miss (which is the basis for most side channel attacks). SecurityCloak is a framework that encompasses GuardCache with SafeLoadOnMiss whereby cache load misses during speculative execution are delayed until the speculation is resolved, thus preventing attacks that rely on accessing data in during (mis) speculated executions. To search for a compromise between security and performance, it is recommended not always to use protections such as SecurityCloak protections, but also to activate the protection only while executing critical sections of code or on-demand when an attack is detected (or suspected). Our experimental results show a high degree of obfuscation (and prevention of side channels) with a minimal impact on the performance.

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Retpoline Technique for Mitigating Spectre Attack

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

Fight Hardware with Hardware: Systemwide Detection and Mitigation of Side-channel Attacks Using Performance Counters

Fight Hardware with Hardware: Systemwide Detection and Mitigation of Side-channel Attacks Using Performance Counters

Skin Grafts for Successful Wound Closure

A Study of Mitigation Methods for Speculative Cache Side Channel Attacks

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