Secure Speculative Execution

Researchers at Purdue University have developed a hardware table and control logic for modern central processing units (CPU), a system known as SpecuGuard. The secure speculative execution system addresses Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities without altering CPU performance, unlike traditional systems. Spectre attacks are used for reading forbidden data by exploiting microprocessor hardware and can induce misspeculated paths, causing unintended side channels through the CPU's microarchitecture where data can be leaked. In either Spectre or Meltdown attacks, entire kernels or browser memories can be read. To plug these channels is difficult and sometimes infeasible and load and control-flow transfer techniques for data cleanup are typically unsafe. However, SpecuGuard allows for delays and recognition of user-checked code prior to committing data transfers. SpecuGuard employes speculative access control tables (SACT) to track load-instruction pairs and evaluate every possible speculative access for improved safety. In addition, SpecuGuard can avoid intrusive changes to clock-critical issue queue circuitry. In testing, SpecuGuard's false positive rate was found to be low while tagging and mapping data even during dynamic memory allocation.

Technology Validation: ​A low rate of false positives was achieved with SpecuGuard.

Publication:

​"Secure Automatic Bound Checking: Prevention is Simpler Than Cure." CGO 2020: Proceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization. ​DOI: 10.1145/3368826.3377921​

Advantages:

​-Prevents Cyber Attacks

-Low False Positive Rate

-Enables More Accurate and Safer Speculative Access Determination​

Applications:

​-Central Processing Unit Hardware

-Cybersecurity ​

TRL: 3

Intellectual Property:

Keywords: Circuits, Computer Engineering, Computer Hardware, Computer Security, cyber-physical systems, Cybersecurity, Data Processing, Memory​, Security, ​Computer Technology