A Software Solution for Hardware Vulnerabilities

Modern processors are becoming increasingly complex with features that improve performance and add new functionality. However, such improvements are a double-edged sword: they improve performance and functionality but also introduce security-critical bugs into the processor that attackers can leverage to bypass a system's security policies. Existing solutions require hardware extensions and often lack the flexibility of software. We present the design of a software-only solution to prevent exploitation of these bugs. Our design builds on the Secure Virtual Architecture and employs both static analysis and run-time checks to prevent applications and operating system kernels from triggering security-critical processor bugs. Our evaluation examines security-critical processor bugs identified in AMD processors and analyzes how they can be mitigated by our design.