Talk Title:
SpecFuzz: Bringing Spectre-type vulnerabilities to the surface
Abstract:
Spectre-type attacks are a real threat to secure systems because a successful attack can undermine even an application that would be traditionally considered safe. SpecFuzz is the first tool that enables fuzzing for such vulnerabilities.
The key is a novel concept of speculation exposure: The program is instrumented to simulate speculative execution in software by forcefully executing the code paths that could be triggered due to mispredictions, thereby making the speculative memory accesses visible to integrity checkers (e.g., AddressSanitizer). Combined with the conventional fuzzing techniques, speculation exposure enables more precise identification of potential vulnerabilities compared to state-of-the-art static analyzers.
Speaker Bio:
Oleksii Oleksenko is a last-year PhD student at TU Dresden in the System Engineering Group. His primary field of research is systems security, especially side-channel and microarchitectural attacks (including recent Spectre and Meltdown). Previously, he did research on memory safety (Intel MPX), trusted executing environments (Intel SGX), and on applying SIMD technologies for fault tolerance.
