Practical Mitigation Guidance for Hardware Vulnerabilities

Transient execution attack methods and their mitigations have been subject to much scrutiny in recent years. While new hardware platform designs are built to mitigate these methods, existing systems may need to implement microcode or software mitigations. But due to the complexity and variety of these methods, system administrators may wonder what, when, and how to mitigate their systems. We examine common mitigation approaches for the Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) and Transactional Asynchronous Abort (TAA) methods, how these mitigations help prevent attackers from leaking data, how they work to prevent attackers from leaking data, and how sysadmins can configure the mitigations depending on the needs of their environment.