This repository contains the PoCs of spectre attacks, such as Spectre-PHT, Spectre-BTB (also known as Spectre-BTI), Spectre-RSB, Spectre-STL. The goal is to evaluate the effectiveness of "SpecBox" defense, which is proposed by the paper

"SpecBox: A Label-Based Transparent Speculation Scheme Against Transient Execution Attacks".

The code only works on GEM5 simulator with O3 CPU Model and Ruby Cache System. Because the contruction of these PoCs refers to the work https://github.com/IAIK/transientfail, we believe that with a slight modification to the PoC, it can also be reproduced on real world hardwares.

The PoCs must be compiled with ’-O0‘ optimizing flag and '-static' linking flag. In addition, for the PoC of Spectre-RSB, it needs additional '-fno-stack-protector' flag to disable the stack canary. In our experiments, the compiler version is "gcc-5.4.0" and the standard library version is "glibc-2.23", which are normally equipped on Ubuntu 16.04 system.

In our experiments, we choose the version "fe187de9bd1aa479ab6cd198522bfd118d0d50ec" for GEM5 simulator (We believe the version does not affects the PoCs, but you may need to update some running options if on other versions). After installing and building the simulator, and also afer building the executable file of the PoCs, you can run them and observe the output in the terminal. The running options of our simulator are:

$GEM5_DIR/build/X86_MESI_Two_Level/gem5.fast \
  $GEM5_DIR/configs/example/se.py \
  -c spectre-pht-icache \
  -o '5 this-is-a-secret' \
  --num-cpus=1 --mem-size=4GB \
  --l1d_assoc=8 --l2_assoc=16 --l1i_assoc=4 \
  --cpu-type=DerivO3CPU \
  --ruby --num-dirs=1 --network=simple --topology=Mesh_XY --mesh-rows=1

In the options, the '-o' option indicates the arguments for the PoC application. It has two parts, the first (i.e. "5") means the repeat numbers of each attack iteration, the second (i.e. "this-is-a-secret") means the secret string to be transmitted in the spectre covert channel.

Bowen Tang ([email protected]), a PhD candidate from Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.