Speculative Load Forwarding Attack on Modern Processors

Abstract

Modern processors deliver high performance by utilizing advanced features such as out-of-order execution, branch prediction, speculative execution, and sophisticated buffer management. Unfortunately, these techniques have introduced diverse vulnerabilities including Spectre, Meltdown, and microarchitectural data sampling (MDS). Although Spectre and Meltdown can leak data via memory side channels, MDS has shown to leak data from the CPU internal buffers in Intel architectures. AMD has reported that its processors are not vulnerable to MDS/Meltdown type attacks. In this paper, we present a Meltdown/MDS type of attack to leak data from the load queue in AMD Zen family architectures. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first attempt in developing an attack on AMD architectures using speculative load forwarding to leak data through the load queue. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that our proposed attack is successful on multiple machines with AMD processors. We also explore a lightweight mitigation to defend against speculative load forwarding attack on modern processors.