CCS2025

RISCover: Automatic Discovery of User-exploitable Architectural Security Vulnerabilities in Closed-Source RISC-V CPUs

Fabian Thomas, Eric García Arribas, Lorenz Hetterich, Daniel Weber, Lukas Gerlach, Ruiyi Zhang, Michael Schwarz

Abstract

The open and extensible RISC-V instruction set has enabled many new CPU vendors and implementations, but most commercial CPUs are closed-source, significantly hindering vulnerability analysis—especially for bugs exploitable from unprivileged user space.