Lightweight and Secure Branch Predictors against Spectre Attacks
Congcong Chen, Chaoqun Shen, Jiliang Zhang
Abstract
Spectre attacks endanger most of CPUs, operating systems and cloud services due to the sharing of branch predic- tors in modern processors, while existing defenses fail to balance the security and overhead. This paper designs a lightweight and secure branch predictor (LS-BP), which provides lightweight hardware isolation for different branch entries of same-address- space and cross-address-space. Therefore, it is difficult for the attacker to establish branch conflicts. Experimental results show the average performance overhead is less than 3% while providing strong protection.
Topics & Concepts
Overhead (engineering)Computer scienceBranch predictorAddress spaceIsolation (microbiology)Computer securityCloud computingComputer networkEmbedded systemOperating systemBiologyMicrobiologySecurity and Verification in ComputingAdvanced Memory and Neural ComputingAdvanced Malware Detection Techniques