Impact of Spectre/Meltdown Kernel Patches on Crypto-Algorithms on Windows Platforms

We evaluate performance impact of kernel patches of two recently discovered catastrophic hardware vulnerabilities (Spectre and Meltdown) That can cause significant harm to security and privacy by memory leaks on a wide range of modern processors including Intel, AMD, and ARM processors and also can affect iOS and Android mobile devices. These vulnerabilities were publicly disclosed in conjunction in January 2018. There are multiple variants of exploits of these flaws. The only fix since their discovery barring designing new hardware is software patches. Such patches can negate some computing speedups computing that were gained by out-of-order execution and branch prediction. Since cryptography is the heart of data security, it is more important to study the performance impact of these patches on crypto-algorithms since exploiting these vulnerabilities can disclose secret keys and other confidential information within few minutes. We first explain these vulnerabilities and their exploits, and reviews relevant related work. Then, we report a number of conducted experiments on Windows platform with and without enabling the kernel patches while running various crypto-algorithms. The results are statistically analyzed to test the hypothesis of whether there is a significant impact on performance for various data sizes and types.