SoK: Analysis of Root Causes and Defense Strategies for Attacks on Microarchitectural Optimizations

Abstract: Microarchitectural optimizations are expected to play a crucial role in ensuring performance scalability in future technology nodes. However, recent attacks have demonstrated that microarchitectural optimizations, which were assumed to be secure, can be exploited. Moreover, new attacks surface at a rapid pace limiting the scope of existing defenses. These developments prompt the need to review microarchitectural optimizations with an emphasis on security, understand the attack landscape and the potential defense strategies. We analyze timing-based side-channel attacks targeting a diverse set of microarchitectural optimizations. We provide a framework for analysing non-transient and transient attacks, which highlights the similarities. We identify the four root causes of timing-based side-channel attacks: determinism, sharing, access violation and information flow, through our systematic analysis. Our key insight is that a subset (or all) of the root causes are exploited by attacks and eliminating any of the exploited root causes, in any attack step, is enough to provide protection. Leveraging our framework, we systematize existing defenses and show that they target these root causes in the different attack steps.