What is it about?
Modern processors run programs faster by guessing what instructions will execute next. While this improves performance, attackers can exploit these guesses to secretly read sensitive data. In this work, we show that these attacks rely on unusual memory accesses that should never occur during correct execution. We develop a software informed hardware defense that identifies which memory regions are safe to access and blocks unsafe speculative accesses before data can leak. This approach protects systems from speculative execution attacks while incurring only minor performance overhead.
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Why is it important?
Our work is the first to determine the safety of a memory operation by analyzing its target address. By leveraging compile-time knowledge of expected memory regions, we enable hardware to distinguish between safe and unsafe speculative accesses, blocking potential data leaks before they occur.
Perspectives
Working on this project was rewarding because it combined ideas from compilers and hardware microarchitecture to address a real security problem.
ANGE-THIERRY ISHIMWE
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: SSMR: Statically Detecting Speculation Safe Memory Regions to Mitigate Transient Execution Attacks, January 2026, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3771775.3786272.
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