SpecWands: An Efficient Priority-Based Scheduler Against Speculation Contention Attacks

doi:10.1109/TCAD.2023.3284290

	SpecWands: An Efficient Priority-Based Scheduler Against Speculation Contention Attacks
	Tang, Bowen 1,2; Wu, Chenggang 1,2,3; Yew, Pen-Chung 4; Zhang, Yinqian 5; Xie, Mengyao 1,2; Lai, Yuanming 1,2; Kang, Yan 1,2; Wang, Wei 1,2; Wei, Qiang 6; Wang, Zhe 1,2
	2023-12-01
发表期刊	IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMPUTER-AIDED DESIGN OF INTEGRATED CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS
ISSN	0278-0070
卷号	42 期号:12 页码:4477-4490
摘要	Transient execution attacks (TEAs) have gradually become a major security threat to modern high-performance processors. They exploit the vulnerability of speculative execution to illegally access private data, and transmit them through timing-based covert channels. While new vulnerabilities are discovered continuously, the covert channels can be categorized to two types: 1) Persistent Type, in which covert channels are based on the layout changes of buffering, e.g., through caches or TLBs and 2) Volatile Type, in which covert channels are based on the contention of sharing resources, e.g., through execution units or issuing ports. The defenses against the persistent-type covert channels have been well addressed, while those for the volatile-type are still rather inadequate. Existing mitigation schemes for the volatile type such as Speculative Compression and Time-Division-Multiplexing will introduce significant overhead due to the need to stall the pipeline or to disallow resource sharing. In this article, we look into such attacks and defenses with a new perspective, and propose a scheduling-based mitigation scheme, called SpecWands. It consists of three priority-based scheduling policies to prevent an attacker from transmitting the secret in different contention situations. SpecWands not only can defend against both interthread and intrathread-based attacks but also can keep most of the performance benefit from speculative execution and resource-sharing. We evaluate its runtime overhead on SPEC 2017 benchmarks and realistic programs. The experimental results show that SpecWands has a significant performance advantage over the other two representative schemes.
关键词	Resource contention scheduling strategy simultaneous multithreading (SMT) transient execution attack (TEA)
DOI	10.1109/TCAD.2023.3284290
收录类别	SCI
语种	英语
资助项目	National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC)
WOS研究方向	Computer Science ; Engineering
WOS类目	Computer Science, Hardware & Architecture ; Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Applications ; Engineering, Electrical & Electronic
WOS记录号	WOS:001123254100012
出版者	IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC
引用统计
文献类型	期刊论文
条目标识符	http://119.78.100.204/handle/2XEOYT63/38859
专题	中国科学院计算技术研究所期刊论文_英文
通讯作者	Wang, Zhe
作者单位	1.Chinese Acad Sci, Inst Comp Technol, SKLP, Beijing 100190, Peoples R China 2.Univ Chinese Acad Sci, Beijing 100049, Peoples R China 3.Zhongguancun Lab, Beijing, Peoples R China 4.Univ Minnesota, Comp Sci & Engn Dept, Minneapolis, MN 55455 USA 5.Southern Univ Sci & Technol, Dept Comp Sci & Engn, Shenzhen 518055, Peoples R China 6.State Key Lab Math Engn & Adv Comp, Zhengzhou 450000, Peoples R China
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	Tang, Bowen,Wu, Chenggang,Yew, Pen-Chung,et al. SpecWands: An Efficient Priority-Based Scheduler Against Speculation Contention Attacks[J]. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMPUTER-AIDED DESIGN OF INTEGRATED CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS,2023,42(12):4477-4490.
APA	Tang, Bowen.,Wu, Chenggang.,Yew, Pen-Chung.,Zhang, Yinqian.,Xie, Mengyao.,...&Wang, Zhe.(2023).SpecWands: An Efficient Priority-Based Scheduler Against Speculation Contention Attacks.IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMPUTER-AIDED DESIGN OF INTEGRATED CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS,42(12),4477-4490.
MLA	Tang, Bowen,et al."SpecWands: An Efficient Priority-Based Scheduler Against Speculation Contention Attacks".IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMPUTER-AIDED DESIGN OF INTEGRATED CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS 42.12(2023):4477-4490.