Secure-by-Design Computing Against Microarchitectural Attacks – SCAMA

Security failure in computing systems has become one of today’s biggest concern. The primary threat is the fact that modern computing architectures –from computational optimizations to storage elements and interfaces, from end-user applications to the operating system & hypervisor, and from microarchitecture to underlying hardware– may hide unexpected vulnerabilities. This concern is gaining further momentum, with the spectacular aggressiveness of Spectre, Meltdown and ZombieLoad vulnerabilities. They demonstrate that even hardware, which is often considered as an abstract layer that behaves correctly by executing instructions and giving a logically correct output, is leaking critical information as a side effect of software implementation and execution. Even worse, the many undocumented parts of modern architectures open doors for yet undescribed side channel attacks. This proposal tackles the problem of these vulnerabilities at the intersection of software and hardware to propose a secure-by-design computing where we strike a balance between security and hard earned performance benefits.