Efficient Detection and Mitigation Schemes for Speculative Side Channels

The introduction of Spectre in 2018 demonstrated a serious threat in almost all modern processors since Spectre exploits the main performance enabler of processors: speculative execution. Detecting and mitigating speculative execution attacks have been a major line of research in the past years. In this work, we explore new ways to bypass existing detection mechanisms and then propose a mitigation strategy to comprehensively prevent speculative execution vulnerabilities through the cache side-channel. Our results show that our proposed protection incurs almost zero performance overhead while improving security.