Mitigating Branch Prediction and Other Timing Based Side Channel Attacks

摘要

To provide hardware protection against timing based side channel attacks, a processor's microarchitecture enables an OS to determine which applications have the privilege to read timestamp and performance counters. Using a white list of applications, and an authentication mechanism to authenticate applications, a legitimate Protection Required Application (PRA) may temporarily prevent other applications from reading timestamp and performance counters while it executes (or excutes sensitive operations).