Jamais vu: thwarting microarchitectural replay attacks

Microarchitectural Replay Attacks (MRAs) enable an attacker to eliminate the measurement variation in potentially any microarchitectural side channel-even if the victim instruction is supposed to execute only once. In an MRA, the attacker forces pipeline flushes in order to repeatedly re-execute the victim instruction and denoise the channel. MRAs are not limited to transient execution attacks: the replayed victim can be an instruction that will eventually retire.

This paper presents the first technique to thwart MRAs. The technique, called Jamais Vu, detects when an instruction is squashed. Then, as the instruction is re-inserted into the pipeline, Jamais Vu automatically places a fence before it to prevent the attacker from squashing it again. This paper presents several Jamais Vu designs that offer different trade-offs between security, execution overhead, and implementation complexity. One design, called Epoch-Loop-Rem, effectively mitigates MRAs, has an average execution time overhead of 13.8% in benign executions, and only needs counting Bloom filters. An even simpler design, called Clear-on-Retire, has an average execution time overhead of only 2.9%, although it is less secure.

• Security and privacy → Side-channel analysis and countermeasures.