Spectre/C++
summary
Describes a practical mitigation suite that compiles attacker-controlled loads into masked operations: Speculative Load Hardening (SLH) inserts masking and passes a speculation state via the stack pointer, LFENCE stops all speculation, and GCC has a __builtin_speculation_safe_value / function attributes for fine-grained control. A working PoC lives at google/safeside. SLH proves effective but costs about 30–40% in typical benchmarks; control-flow tracking adds another large fraction of overhead.
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chapters (6)
- 0:00Introduction to Spectre
- 12:54Spectre proof of concept
- 16:21Mitigating Spectre variants
- 25:32Speculative Load Hardening
- 31:18Future of Spectre in C++
- 45:57Summary and Q&A
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