Presentation
Reconnaissance: Correctly Tracking Multiple Secrets Using Reveal/conceal Paradigms
DescriptionSecure speculation schemes are critical for defeating speculative side-channel attacks, but often incur notable performance penalties, encouraging research into optimization strategies. One such optimization strategy, ReCon, improves performance by exploiting previous non-speculative data leakage to remove protections for already leaked data. However, we find that ReCon can leak secrets when an instruction depends on multiple sources of potentially secret data. We show how interactions between Speculative Taint Tracking (STT) and ReCon results in ReCon undermining STT's security guarantees. We address this oversight through a low-impact multi-source tracking mechanism that we call ReConnaissance. Together with a detailed microarchitecture, we show that, on average, ReConnaissance only lowers the overhead-reduction of ReCon from 23.5% to 18.3% on SPEC2017.
Event Type
Research Manuscript
TimeTuesday, July 2810:43am - 10:56am PDT
LocationMtg Room 203C