Attacks on Modern Microprocessors and Hardware Defense Strategies

Attackers have targeted software and networking for a long time. Now they are also attacking the hardware foundations of computers. Attacks on microprocessors, the brains of computers, can be devastating. We illustrate with the recent rush of speculative execution attacks that exploit the performance optimization features at the microarchitecture level of modern microprocessors, to leak arbitrary secrets. To defend against these attacks without suffering severe performance degradation and software incompatibility, hardware solutions are desired. In this talk, Lee sheds light on the critical attack steps of speculative execution attacks (also called transient execution attacks), and why these attacks succeed. She discusses potential hardware defense strategies, and defenses proposed by the computer architecture research community. Beyond current attacks and defenses, are there new proactive design strategies that enable future microprocessors to improve both attack-resilience and performance? | Ruby B. Lee is Forest G. Hamrick Professor and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering emeritus at Princeton University.