Homework10_Solution (1)

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Jan 9, 2024

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ECE 446/579:04 (Spring 2023) Homework #10 Solution 1. (Meltdown Attack) Based on the Meltdown paper we discussed in the lecture (M. Lipp et al., Meltdown: Reading Kernel Memory from User Space, USENIX Security), please answer the following questions: a. What hardware feature does the Meltdown attack exploit and what was the original role of that feature in computer architecture? b. Please discuss how the Meltdown attack works with an example. c. Please provide 1 or 2 countermeasures to defend against Meltdown attack and discuss their pros and cons. a. Out-of-order execution; original role is to improve the performance of the program execution (i.e., reducing execution time by reducing the number of stalls due to data hazards). b. See Pages 27-28 of Slides10. c. See Pages 29-30 of Slides10. 2. (Spectre Attack) Repeat Question 2, now for the Spectre paper we discussed in the lecture (2018P. Kocher et al., Spectre Attacks: Exploiting Speculative Execution, IEEE S&P 2019). a. Speculative execution; original role is to improve the performance of the program execution (i.e., reducing execution time by reducing the number of stalls due to control hazards, i.e., the branch statements). b. See Pages 31-33 of Slides10. c. See Pages 34 of Slides10. 3. (Meltdown & Spectre Attacks) Based on your answers in Questions 1 and 2, can you please summarize the similarities and differences between Meltdown and Spectre attacks? - Similarities: Both are based on microarchitecture effects (i.e., data loaded into cache) due to execution of the instructions that are not supposed to be executed. This is achieved by leveraging the instruction-level parallelism features in computer architecture that were designed for performance improvements. - Differences: (1) Meltdown exploits out-of-order execution, and Spectre exploits speculative execution. (2) Meltdown aims to gain access to the data in the kernel space, and Spectre aims to gain access to the data owned by the other processes in the user space.
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