A Systematic Study on Spectre Attacks and Defenses

Abstract

Spectre attacks is an important category of side channel methods, which allows attacker to obtain
sensitive data by observing the system. Spectre attacks exploit modern processors’ features designed
for the performance: out-of-order execution and speculative execution. Also, in Spectre attacks,
cache side-channel attack methods play an important role. The high-level goal of Spectre attacks
is to load target data into the cache through the speculative execution. Once it has been done, the
next step is leaking information. To the end, the cache side-channel methods are employed to leak
information, because there is no direct way to read data from the cache. In this paper, we discuss
variations of Spectre attacks and discuss defense mechanisms for each of them.