Abstract
The processors have long been treated as trusted black boxes for running software. However, processors may have undocumented instructions and instruction flaws, which increase the attack surface of the computing system. Hardware-related attack surfaces can bypass malware detection tools, resulting in undefined system behavior, instability, and insecurity. Unfortunately, the existing testing methods for undocumented instructions and instruction flaws have issues of insufficient test coverage and low test efficiency. We proposed an approach Skipscan to address these issues, which tests both the legal instructions and the reserved instructions. For the first time, to improve the test coverage, Skipscan leverages an <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">optimized combination algorithm</i> to generate instruction prefix combinations, which covers the entire types of legal prefix combinations. To improve the test efficiency, Skipscan skips a considerable number of redundant legal instructions by leveraging the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">minimal test set</i> of immediate and displacement operands. We evaluated Skipscan on eight x86 processors from Intel and AMD. The number of legal instructions and reserved instructions tested by Skipscan are 121.4 and 259.55 times that of Sandsifter on average, respectively. The test efficiency of Skipscan is on average 4 times that of Sandsifter. The ratio of legal instructions is reduced from 78.2% to 20.1% on average. Furthermore, we found more undocumented instructions on x86 processors and instruction flaws in x86 disassemblers.
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