Speculative and Traditional Execution Side Channel and Software Protection Mechanisms

This presentation focuses on the common characteristics of speculative execution side-channel methods and how they compare to traditional side channel methods. Neelima will introduce some of the architectural concepts that designers have created over the years to enhance performance, and then discuss how researchers have used those same concepts to describe how malicious actors could potentially infer secret data. She will focus on some common software environments and where they may be exposed to speculative execution side channel methods. Then, based on different approaches that Intel is taking to mitigate the issues in collaboration with the open source community, provide techniques that developers can implement to better safeguard their software and secrets.