Pensieve: Microarchitectural Modeling for Security Evaluation

Traditional modeling approaches in computer architecture aim to obtain an accurate estimation of performance, area, and energy of a processor design. With the advent of speculative execution attacks and their security concerns, these traditional modeling techniques fall short when used for security evaluation of defenses against these attacks. This thesis presents Pensieve, a security evaluation framework targeting early-stage microarchitectural defenses against speculative execution attacks. At the core, it introduces a modeling discipline for systematically studying early-stage defenses. This discipline allows us to cover a space of designs that are functionally equivalent while precisely capturing timing variations due to resource contention and microarchitectural optimizations. We implement a model checking framework to automatically find vulnerabilities in designs. We use Pensieve to evaluate a series of state-of-the-art invisible speculation defense schemes, including Delay-on-Miss, InvisiSpec, and GhostMinion, against a formally defined security property, speculative non-interference. Pensieve finds Spectre-like attacks in all those defenses, including a new speculative interference attack variant that breaks GhostMinion, one of the latest defenses.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Yang, Yuheng

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Yan, Mengjia

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright retained by author(s)

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/153853

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/153853