When it leaks, it pours: on the (sad) state of today’s hardware security

Abstract: The security and architecture communities will remember 2018 as the year of side channels. Starting from Spectre and Meltdown, time and again we have seen how basic performance-improving features can be exploited to violate fundamental hardware security guarantees. In this talk, I will survey a line of work on speculative execution attacks, showing how despite many mitigation efforts attackers can leak sensitive data across different address spaces and security domains.