A Systematic Evaluation of Transient Execution Attacks and Defenses

Authors: 

Claudio Canella, Graz University of Technology; Jo Van Bulck, imec-DistriNet, KU Leuven; Michael Schwarz, Moritz Lipp, Benjamin von Berg, and Philipp Ortner, Graz University of Technology; Frank Piessens, imec-DistriNet, KU Leuven; Dmitry Evtyushkin, College of William and Mary; Daniel Gruss, Graz University of Technology

Abstract: 

Research on transient execution attacks including Spectre and Meltdown showed that exception or branch misprediction events might leave secret-dependent traces in the CPU’s microarchitectural state. This observation led to a proliferation of new Spectre and Meltdown attack variants and even more ad-hoc defenses (e.g., microcode and software patches). Both the industry and academia are now focusing on finding effective defenses for known issues. However, we only have limited insight on residual attack surface and the completeness of the proposed defenses.

In this paper, we present a systematization of transient execution attacks. Our systematization uncovers 6 (new) transient execution attacks that have been overlooked and not been investigated so far: 2 new exploitable Meltdown effects: Meltdown-PK (Protection Key Bypass) on Intel, and Meltdown-BND (Bounds Check Bypass) on Intel and AMD; and 4 new Spectre mistraining strategies. We evaluate the attacks in our classification tree through proof-of-concept implementations on 3 major CPU vendors (Intel, AMD, ARM). Our systematization yields a more complete picture of the attack surface and allows for a more systematic evaluation of defenses. Through this systematic evaluation, we discover that most defenses, including deployed ones, cannot fully mitigate all attack variants.

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {236214,
author = {Claudio Canella and Jo Van Bulck and Michael Schwarz and Moritz Lipp and Benjamin von Berg and Philipp Ortner and Frank Piessens and Dmitry Evtyushkin and Daniel Gruss},
title = {A Systematic Evaluation of Transient Execution Attacks and Defenses},
booktitle = {28th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 19)},
year = {2019},
isbn = {978-1-939133-06-9},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
pages = {249--266},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity19/presentation/canella},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}

Presentation Video