Transient execution vulnerabilities in the security context of server hardware
type: CreativeWork
description: The thesis of this work is that eliminating speculation is a feasible approach to mitigating the transient execution vulnerabilities on large-scale server hardware. Many mitigations have been proposed and implemented for many variants of the transient execution vulnerabilities, and while the Meltdown-type exception-based transient execution vulnerabilities have proven to be tractable, Spectre-type vulnerabilities and other speculation-based transient execution vulnerabilities have been far more resistant to countermeasures. After years of research and development by academia and industry, eliminating speculation is still the only reliable countermeasure against Spectre. For smaller-scale embedded systems or security-focused hardware such as a cryptographic system or a root-of-trust (RoT), eliminating speculation is widely accepted as a reasonable approach to improving security. But, for larger-scale and general-purpose hardware, eliminating speculation is often rapidly dismissed as inconceivable, though the claim that speculation is required for adequate performance is rarely supported by concrete performance results. The performance results we do have from several independent strands of research over the past few decades have shown that speculation features on large-scale server hardware do not offer the same performance advantages as on smaller-scale hardware, so eliminating speculation on large-scale server hardware does not harm performance as much as we might suspect. And selective speculation techniques have shown that speculation-based transient execution vulnerabilities can be mitigated by a partial elimination of speculation, so we can preserve some of the performance of speculation while subduing the security risk. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of eliminating speculation from modern server hardware microarchitectures, I consider three alternative approaches that partially or completely eliminate speculative execution. Heterogeneous multicore syst…
abstract: The thesis of this work is that eliminating speculation is a feasible approach to mitigating the transient execution vulnerabilities on large-scale server hardware. Many mitigations have been proposed and implemented for many variants of the transient execution vulnerabilities, and while the Meltdown-type exception-based transient execution vulnerabilities have proven to be tractable, Spectre-type vulnerabilities and other speculation-based transient execution vulnerabilities have been far more resistant to countermeasures. After years of research and development by academia and industry, eliminating speculation is still the only reliable countermeasure against Spectre. For smaller-scale embedded systems or security-focused hardware such as a cryptographic system or a root-of-trust (RoT), eliminating speculation is widely accepted as a reasonable approach to improving security. But, for larger-scale and general-purpose hardware, eliminating speculation is often rapidly dismissed as inconceivable, though the claim that speculation is required for adequate performance is rarely supported by concrete performance results. The performance results we do have from several independent strands of research over the past few decades have shown that speculation features on large-scale server hardware do not offer the same performance advantages as on smaller-scale hardware, so eliminating speculation on large-scale server hardware does not harm performance as much as we might suspect. And selective speculation techniques have shown that speculation-based transient execution vulnerabilities can be mitigated by a partial elimination of speculation, so we can preserve some of the performance of speculation while subduing the security risk. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of eliminating speculation from modern server hardware microarchitectures, I consider three alternative approaches that partially or completely eliminate speculative execution. Heterogeneous multicore syst…
author: Randal, Allison
language: eng
keywords: Meltdown, security, server hardware, Spectre, speculative execution, transient execution vulnerabilities
license: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/d8541db7-d107-4598-89ec-b86fc3460317/download
license: https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/
date published: 2023-07-18
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:33:15Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.104431