Protean: A Programmable Spectre Defense
We present the Protean Spectre defense—the first to be altogether comprehensive, covering all side-channels and speculation; programmer-transparent, requiring no source modifications; and programmable, tailoring its hardware protections to software’s security needs. Several Spectre defenses offer the first two features, but protect a hardware-defined subset of architectural state from transiently leaking. Meanwhile, many Spectre-vulnerable programs process secrets in ways that such rigid protections cannot both performantly and fully secure. Protean overcomes this limitation through: (1) ProtISA, an ISA extension that allows software to tell hardware which architectural registers and memory bytes require protection from transiently leaking at each program point; (2) ProtCC, a compiler that automatically infers and programs ProtISA protections for vulnerable code with minimal user input; and (3) ProtDelay and ProtTrack, two alternative hardware mechanisms that performantly enforce software-defined ProtISA protections. By flexibly tailoring a hardware Spectre defense to a program’s data protection needs, Protean significantly reduces the overhead of fully securing vulnerable programs. With ProtDelay/ProtTrack, it averages 0.27x/0.18x and 0.42x/0.34x of the runtime overhead of the best secure baseline for programs with and without mixed security needs, respectively, at lower/comparable hardware complexity.
Wed 4 FebDisplayed time zone: Hobart change
09:50 - 11:10 | Hardware Security and Side-Channel DefensesMain Conference at Collaroy Chair(s): Georgios Vavouliotis Huawei Zurich Research Center, Switzerland | ||
09:50 20mTalk | DSASSASSIN: Cross-VM Side-Channel Attacks by Exploiting Intel Data Streaming Accelerator Main Conference Ben Chen The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Kunlin Li The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Shuwen Deng Tsinghua University, Dongsheng Wang Tsinghua University, Yun Chen The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) | ||
10:10 20mTalk | SSBleed: Non-speculative Side-channel Attacks via Speculative Store Bypass on Armv9 CPUs Main Conference Chang Liu Tsinghua University, Hongpei Zheng Tsinghua University, Xin Zhang Peking University, Dapeng Ju Tsinghua University, Dongsheng Wang Tsinghua University, Yinqian Zhang Southern University of Science and Technology, Trevor E. Carlson National University of Singapore | ||
10:30 20mTalk | Protean: A Programmable Spectre Defense Main Conference Nicholas Mosier Stanford University, Hamed Nemati KTH Royal Institute of Technology, John C. Mitchell Stanford University, Caroline Trippel Stanford University | ||
10:50 20mTalk | HERO-Sign: Hierarchical Tuning and Efficient Compiler-Time GPU Optimizations for SPHINCS$^+$ Signature Generation Main Conference Yaoyun Zhou University of California, Merced, Qian Wang University of California, Merced (UC Merced) | ||