SCIENCE@home

ExSpectre: Hiding Malware in Speculative Execution

Jack Wampler,Ian Martiny,Eric Wustrow

Published 2019 in Network and Distributed System Security Symposium

ABSTRACT

—Recently, the Spectre and Meltdown attacks revealed serious vulnerabilities in modern CPU designs, allowing an attacker to exfiltrate data from sensitive programs. These vulnerabilities take advantage of speculative execution to coerce a processor to perform computation that would otherwise not occur, leaking the resulting information via side channels to an attacker. In this paper, we extend these ideas in a different direction, and leverage speculative execution in order to hide malware from both static and dynamic analysis. Using this technique, critical portions of a malicious program’s computation can be shielded from view, such that even a debugger following an instruction-level trace of the program cannot tell how its results were computed. We introduce ExSpectre , which compiles arbitrary malicious code into a seemingly-benign payload binary. When a separate trigger program runs on the same machine, it mistrains the CPU’s branch predictor, causing the payload program to speculatively execute its malicious payload, which communicates speculative results back to the rest of the payload program to change its real-world behavior.

PUBLICATION RECORD

  • Publication year

    2019

  • Venue

    Network and Distributed System Security Symposium

  • Publication date

    Unknown publication date

  • Fields of study

    Computer Science

  • Identifiers
    DOI 10.14722/ndss.2019.23409
  • External record

    Open on Semantic Scholar

  • Source metadata

    Semantic Scholar

CITATION MAP

EXTRACTION MAP

CLAIMS

  • No claims are published for this paper.

CONCEPTS

  • No concepts are published for this paper.

REFERENCES

Showing 1-50 of 50 references · Page 1 of 1

CITED BY

Showing 1-38 of 38 citing papers · Page 1 of 1