A Review on Vulnerabilities to Modern Processors and its Mitigation for Various Variants

Abstract

Recently, security researchers have found two hardware security vulnerabilities namely Spectre and Meltdown, related to computer memory. They are not singular, many variants of these two vulnerabilities are being a head ache for secure hardware designers. These attacks affect the modern CPUs which use speculative and out-of-order execution for optimization. This attack may affect the computing device which using the processor like Intel, AMD, ARM, and other processors like ARM processors that may use by mobile devices. By exploiting these attack that may allow the adversary to gain the control of a device to capture all the secrete data available on the system or a memory. These vulnerabilities need the better solution at the hardware level, but the problem is hardware updates is not possible at the real-time. In the face, the software-based solution is not addressed by the long run to avoid this attack, this solution is only for time constrain. This paper presents the solution for different variants of Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities and how they are dangerous to the modern processors like Intel, AMD, and so on to avoid the damage of the hardware using Hardware Performance Counters (HPCs). Finally, some of the mitigation techniques against these vulnerabilities are suggested based on the running application of a device.