Discovered in 2017 and publicly disclosed in January 2018,
the Spectre attack exploits critical vulnerabilities existing in many modern processors, including those
from Intel, AMD, and ARM. The vulnerabilities allow a program to break inter-process
and intra-process isolation, so a malicious program can read the
data from the area that is not accessible to it.
Such an access is not allowed by the hardware protection mechanism (for inter-process isolation) or
software protection mechanism (for intra-prcess isolation),
but a vulnerability exists in the design of
CPUs that makes it possible to defeat the protections.
Because the flaw exists
in the hardware, it is very difficult to fundamentally fix the problem, unless we change the CPUs
in our computers. The Spectre vulnerability represents a special genre of
vulnerabilities in the design of CPUs. Along with the
Meltdown vulnerability, they provide an invaluable lesson for security education.
The learning objective of this lab is for students to gain first-hand experiences on the Spectre attack. The attack itself is quite sophisticated, so we break it down into several small steps, each of which is easy to understand and perform. Once students understand each step, it should not be difficult for them to put everything together to perform the actual attack.
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