Automatic Detection of Speculative Execution Combinations

ABSTRACTModern processors employ different speculation mechanisms to speculate over different kinds of instructions. Attackers can exploit these mechanisms simultaneously in order to trigger leaks of speculatively-accessed data. Thus, sound reasoning about such speculative leaks requires accounting for all potential speculation mechanisms. Unfortunately, existing formal models only support reasoning about fixed, hard-coded speculation mechanisms, with no simple support to extend said reasoning to new mechanisms. In this paper, we develop a framework for reasoning about composed speculative semantics that capture speculation due to different mechanisms and implement it as part of the Spectector verification tool. We implement novel semantics for speculating over store and return instructions and combine them with the semantics for speculating over branch instructions. Our framework yields speculative semantics for speculating over any combination of these instructions that are secure by construction, i.e., we obtain these security guarantees for free. The implementation of our novel semantics in Spectector let us verify programs that are vulnerable to Spectre v1, Spectre v4, and Spectre v5 vulnerabilities as well as new snippets that are only vulnerable to their compositions.