Janus: Compiler-Based Defense Against Transient Execution Attacks Using ARM Hardware Primitives
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arXiv
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| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866917479849132032 |
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| author | Ouyang, Ciyan Li, Peinan Huang, Yubiao Meng, Dan Hou, Rui |
| author_facet | Ouyang, Ciyan Li, Peinan Huang, Yubiao Meng, Dan Hou, Rui |
| contents | We present Janus, a compiler-based security framework that mitigates
transient execution attacks like Spectre and control-flow hijacking on
ARM64 platforms. Janus integrates speculative execution and control flow
dependencies with PA modifiers, using PA and BTI microarchitectural
features to prevent control-flow speculation attacks and secure both
control flow and speculative execution through existing control-flow
integrity mechanisms. To optimize performance, Janus minimizes overhead
by merging defense operations across different defense layers (modifier
fusion) and reusing registers of protected variables (carrier reuse),
while maintaining strong security guarantees. Evaluation on SPEC CPU2017
shows an average performance overhead of 3.85%, with real-world
applications exhibiting overheads ranging from 2.97% to 7.80%. Janus
offers effective speculative execution security and low performance and
code size overhead, making it a robust solution for ARM-based systems. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_10049 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Janus: Compiler-Based Defense Against Transient Execution Attacks Using ARM Hardware Primitives Ouyang, Ciyan Li, Peinan Huang, Yubiao Meng, Dan Hou, Rui Cryptography and Security D.4.6; C.1.3; D.3.4 We present Janus, a compiler-based security framework that mitigates transient execution attacks like Spectre and control-flow hijacking on ARM64 platforms. Janus integrates speculative execution and control flow dependencies with PA modifiers, using PA and BTI microarchitectural features to prevent control-flow speculation attacks and secure both control flow and speculative execution through existing control-flow integrity mechanisms. To optimize performance, Janus minimizes overhead by merging defense operations across different defense layers (modifier fusion) and reusing registers of protected variables (carrier reuse), while maintaining strong security guarantees. Evaluation on SPEC CPU2017 shows an average performance overhead of 3.85%, with real-world applications exhibiting overheads ranging from 2.97% to 7.80%. Janus offers effective speculative execution security and low performance and code size overhead, making it a robust solution for ARM-based systems. |
| title | Janus: Compiler-Based Defense Against Transient Execution Attacks Using ARM Hardware Primitives |
| topic | Cryptography and Security D.4.6; C.1.3; D.3.4 |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10049 |