[pl-seminar] Fwd: PL-Arch Discussion on Spectre & Meltdown

["Mark D. Hill" <markhill@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear MadPL:

Is there interest in having a discussion on Spectre and Meltdown that use intentional processor core mis-speculation to exfiltrate protected information on almost all computers including your laptop and phone? Here is a formal PL paper from Google we could discuss:

Spectre is here to stay An analysis of side-channels and speculative execution

https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.05178v1 

I know itâs formal, as it has Greek letters with Greek-letter subscripts. :-) Thanks to Mike Swift for finding it. 

Also here is a practical introduction to the problem and the gist of current mitigation strategies that I co-wrote for IEEE Micro, so it might assume more architecture than everyone knows. 

On the Spectre and Meltdown Processor Security Vulnerabilities

http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~markhill/papers/ieeemicro19_spectre_meltdown_2019_01_30.pdf 

Let me know if there is interest,
âMark

Mark D. Hill, http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~markhill
John P. Morgridge Prof. and Gene M. Amdahl Prof. of CS 
Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Chair, Computing Community Consortium, http://cra.org/ccc/