What is it about?
Holding multiple copies of data is a common technique to speed-up computation. The copies are commonly called caches, but we also discuss other, less common techniques used that similarly also maintain copies of the original data. We then discuss the security impacts of having such copies.
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Why is it important?
Most computer designers and architects do not fully grasp that the addition of copies of data to speed-up computation brings security questions (and potential problems). We discuss what those problems are, give examples in modern platforms and also present ways to analyze a given design/architecture to identify such problems.
Perspectives
With the latest speculative side-channels, a lot of attention has been given to transient execution and how the caches affect them. But very little in terms of other security impacts on the usage of caches have been discussed recently. This survey tries to bridge that gap.
Rodrigo Branco
Oregon State University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Cache-related Hardware Capabilities and Their Impact on Information Security, ACM Computing Surveys, December 2022, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3534962.
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