Branch Predictor Partitioning for Performance

Proposed the Oasis cache: A randomized cache design with minimal design complexity and ultra-low cost

Code translation in Half&Half

Guide: Prof. Dean Tullsen

MIRAGE is a secure fully-associative last-level cache design which guarantees complete security against eviction-based side-channel attacks, but at a hefty hardware overhead of 17%. MAYA, on the other hand, guarantees the same level of security, at no hardware overhead. It is also able to save around 6% in terms of energy and area compared to the baseline. However, both these designs have a fair bit of additional design complexity, which make them impractical to be adopted by the industry. We are working on a secure randomized cache design which provides security at an ultra-low cost and minimal additional design complexity. This makes our cache design very pratical and easy to implement.

References

2023

  1. Half&Half: Demystifying Intel’s Directional Branch Predictors for Fast, Secure Partitioned Execution
    Hosein Yavarzadeh, Mohammadkazem Taram, Shravan Narayan, and 2 more authors
    In 2023 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP), Aug 2023