Speculative Leakage in ARM Cortex-A53
This addresses a security problem for users of ARM Cortex-A53 processors, revealing a novel vulnerability in a widely used architecture.
The paper demonstrates that the ARM Cortex-A53 processor is vulnerable to speculative leakage attacks, even without out-of-order execution, introducing a new class of vulnerabilities called SiSCloak.
The recent Spectre attacks have demonstrated that modern microarchitectural optimizations can make software insecure. These attacks use features like pipelining, out-of-order and speculation to extract information about the memory contents of a process via side-channels. In this paper we demonstrate that Cortex-A53 is affected by speculative leakage even if the microarchitecture does not support out-of-order execution. We named this new class of vulnerabilities SiSCloak.