Transient Execution of Non-Canonical Accesses

Abstract

Recent years have brought microarchitectural security intothe spotlight, proving that modern CPUs are vulnerable toseveral classes of microarchitectural attacks. These attacksbypass the basic isolation primitives provided by the CPUs:process isolation, memory permissions, access checks, andso on. Nevertheless, most of the research was focused on In-tel CPUs, with only a few exceptions. As a result, few vulner-abilities have been found in other CPUs, leading to specula-tions about their immunity to certain types of microarchi-tectural attacks. In this paper, we provide a black-box anal-ysis of one of these under-explored areas. Namely, we inves-tigate the flaw of AMD CPUs which may lead to a transientexecution hijacking attack. Contrary to nominal immunity,we discover that AMD Zen family CPUs exhibit transient ex-ecution patterns similar for Meltdown/MDS. Our analysisof exploitation possibilities shows that AMDs design deci-sions indeed limit the exploitability scope comparing to In-tel CPUs, yet it may be possible to use them to amplify othermicroarchitectural attacks.