Beyond Over-Protection: A Targeted Approach to Spectre Mitigation and Performance Optimization

Since the advent of Spectre attacks, researchers and practitioners have developed a range of hardware and software measures to counter transient execution attacks. A prime example of such mitigation is speculative load hardening (slh) in LLVM, which protects against leaks by tracking the speculation state and masking values during misspeculation. LLVM relies on static analysis to harden programs using slh that often results in over-protection, which incurs performance overhead. We extended an existing side-channel model validation framework, Scam-V, to check the vulnerability of programs to Spectre-PHT attacks and optimize the protection of programs using the slh approach. We illustrate the efficacy of Scam-V by first demonstrating that it can automatically identify Spectre vulnerabilities in programs, e.g., fragments of crypto-libraries. We then develop an optimization mechanism to validate the necessity of slh hardening w.r.t. the target platform. Our experiments showed that hardening introduced by LLVM in most cases could be improved when the underlying microarchitecture properties are considered.