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1. Verfasser: Smith, Graeme
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.19128
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author Smith, Graeme
author_facet Smith, Graeme
contents Speculative execution is a hardware optimisation technique where a processor, while waiting on the completion of a computation required for an instruction, continues to execute later instructions based on a predicted value of the pending computation. It came to the forefront of security research in 2018 with the disclosure of two related attacks, Spectre and Meltdown. Since then many similar attacks have been identified. While there has been much research on using formal methods to detect speculative execution vulnerabilities based on predicted control flow, there has been significantly less on vulnerabilities based on predicted data flow. In this paper, we introduce an approach for detecting the data flow vulnerabilities, Spectre-STL and Spectre-PSF, using weakest precondition reasoning. We validate our approach on a suite of litmus tests used to validate related approaches in the literature.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_19128
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Detecting speculative data flow vulnerabilities using weakest precondition reasoning
Smith, Graeme
Logic in Computer Science
Cryptography and Security
Speculative execution is a hardware optimisation technique where a processor, while waiting on the completion of a computation required for an instruction, continues to execute later instructions based on a predicted value of the pending computation. It came to the forefront of security research in 2018 with the disclosure of two related attacks, Spectre and Meltdown. Since then many similar attacks have been identified. While there has been much research on using formal methods to detect speculative execution vulnerabilities based on predicted control flow, there has been significantly less on vulnerabilities based on predicted data flow. In this paper, we introduce an approach for detecting the data flow vulnerabilities, Spectre-STL and Spectre-PSF, using weakest precondition reasoning. We validate our approach on a suite of litmus tests used to validate related approaches in the literature.
title Detecting speculative data flow vulnerabilities using weakest precondition reasoning
topic Logic in Computer Science
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.19128