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Computer Science > Cryptography and Security

arXiv:2007.15919 (cs)
[Submitted on 31 Jul 2020 (v1), last revised 5 May 2021 (this
version, v2)]

Title:BasicBlocker: ISA Redesign to Make Spectre-Immune CPUs Faster

Authors:Jan Philipp Thoma, Jakob Feldtkeller, Markus Krausz, Tim
Guneysu, Daniel J. Bernstein
Download a PDF of the paper titled BasicBlocker: ISA Redesign to Make
Spectre-Immune CPUs Faster, by Jan Philipp Thoma and 4 other authors
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    Abstract: Recent research has revealed an ever-growing class of
    microarchitectural attacks that exploit speculative execution, a
    standard feature in modern processors. Proposed and deployed
    countermeasures involve a variety of compiler updates, firmware
    updates, and hardware updates. None of the deployed
    countermeasures have convincing security arguments, and many of
    them have already been broken.
    The obvious way to simplify the analysis of speculative-execution
    attacks is to eliminate speculative execution. This is normally
    dismissed as being unacceptably expensive, but the underlying
    cost analyses consider only software written for current
    instruction-set architectures, so they do not rule out the
    possibility of a new instruction-set architecture providing
    acceptable performance without speculative execution. A new ISA
    requires compiler and hardware updates, but these are happening
    in any case.
    This paper introduces BasicBlocker, a generic ISA modification
    that works for all common ISAs and that allows non-speculative
    CPUs to obtain most of the performance benefit that would have
    been provided by speculative execution. To demonstrate the
    feasibility of BasicBlocker, this paper defines a variant of the
    RISC-V ISA called BBRISC-V and provides a thorough evaluation on
    both a 5-stage in-order soft core and a superscalar out-of-order
    processor using an associated compiler and a variety of benchmark
    programs.

Comments:   Preprint
Subjects:   Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Hardware Architecture
            (cs.AR)
Cite as:    arXiv:2007.15919 [cs.CR]
            (or arXiv:2007.15919v2 [cs.CR] for this version)
            https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2007.15919
            Focus to learn more
            arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
Related DOI https://doi.org/10.1145/3471621.3471857
:           Focus to learn more
            DOI(s) linking to related resources

Submission history

From: Jan Philipp Thoma [view email]
[v1] Fri, 31 Jul 2020 09:30:45 UTC (211 KB)
[v2] Wed, 5 May 2021 10:37:33 UTC (758 KB)
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