Presentation
Tactician: A Formal Workflow for Discovering Unintended Interactions Among Microarchitectural Defenses
DescriptionMicroarchitectural attacks continue to expand, prompting designers to combine multiple defenses within the same processor. Yet these defenses are typically evaluated in isolation, raising a key problem: when integrated, do they still uphold their security guarantees? To address this, we need a systematic way to model defense behaviors, reason about their timing and state interactions, and detect when compositions violate each other's assumptions and specifications. We introduce a lightweight event-based analysis framework that exposes such issues early in the design process. Using it, we identify several problematic defense interactions, demonstrate one as an exploitable timing channel in GEM5, and show that a low-overhead fix (<3%) resolves it.
Event Type
Work in Progress
TimeMonday, July 276:56pm - 6:56pm PDT
LocationExhibit Hall
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