Mill vs. Spectre - Performance and Security

This course explains how Spectre and Meltdown exploit speculative execution and out-of-order CPU architectures to access and exfiltrate secrets. It contrasts these designs with Mill's non-speculative architecture and its approach to achieving high performance without the same security flaw.

Syllabus

Number fourteen of a series
Dramatis personae
The plot
To steal a secret...
Access vs. Exfiltration
Speculative execution
How to drive a branch predictor
Our story so far
On caches and cache pollution
Meanwhile, back at the Lair
Some details
Mitigation
Memory hierarchy from 40,000 ft.
The load problem
Mill "deferred loads"
Reordering constraints
What if speculation gets in trouble?
(Non-)speculable operations
Speculation compared
The Mill protection model
Credits
Disclaimer