In recent years, several hardware-based countermeasures proposed to mitigate Spectre attacks have been shown to be insecure. To enable the development of effective secure speculation countermeasures, we need easy-to-use tools that can automatically test their security guarantees early-on in the design phase to facilitate rapid prototyping.<\/p>\n
This paper develops AMuLeT, the first tool capable of testing secure speculation countermeasures for speculative leakage early in their design phase in simulators. Our key idea is to leverage model-based relational testing tools that can detect speculative leaks in commercial CPUs, and apply them to micro-architectural simulators to test secure speculation defenses. We identify and overcome several challenges, including designing an expressive yet realistic attacker observer model in a simulator, overcoming the slow simulation speed, and searching the vast micro-architectural state space for potential vulnerabilities. AMuLeT speeds up test throughput by more than 10x compared to a naive design and uses techniques to amplify vulnerabilities to uncover them within a limited test budget. Using AMuLeT, we launch for the first time, a systematic, large-scale testing campaign of four secure speculation countermeasures from 2018 to 2024-InvisiSpec, CleanupSpec, STT, and SpecLFB-and uncover 3 known and 6 unknown bugs and vulnerabilities, within 3 hours of testing. We also show for the first time that the open-source implementation of SpecLFB is insecure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In recent years, several hardware-based countermeasures proposed to mitigate Spectre attacks have been shown to be insecure. To enable the development of effective secure speculation countermeasures, we need easy-to-use tools that can automatically test their security guarantees early-on in the design phase to facilitate rapid prototyping. This paper develops AMuLeT, the first tool capable of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":null,"msr_publishername":"Association for Computing Machinery","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"","msr_journal":"","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_page_range_start":"","msr_page_range_end":"","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"","msr_copyright":"","msr_conference_name":"30th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems","msr_doi":"","msr_arxiv_id":"","msr_s2_paper_id":"","msr_mag_id":"","msr_pubmed_id":"","msr_other_authors":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_award":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_institution":"","msr_host":"","msr_version":"","msr_duration":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":null,"msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_s2_match_type":"","msr_citation_count_updated":"","msr_published_date":"2025-2-28","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_notes":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_conference_url":"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/proceedings\/10.1145\/3676641","msr_journal_url":"","msr_s2_pdf_url":"","msr_year":0,"msr_citation_count":0,"msr_influential_citations":0,"msr_reference_count":0,"msr_s2_match_confidence":0,"msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":true,"msr_s2_open_access":false,"msr_s2_author_ids":[],"msr_pub_ids":[],"msr_hide_image_in_river":null,"footnotes":""},"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13558],"msr-publication-type":[193716],"msr-publisher":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-field-of-study":[249619,246691,248383],"msr-conference":[259537],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-1145956","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-security-privacy-cryptography","msr-locale-en_us","msr-field-of-study-computer-architecture","msr-field-of-study-computer-science","msr-field-of-study-computer-security"],"msr_publishername":"Association for Computing Machinery","msr_edition":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_published_date":"2025-2-28","msr_host":"","msr_duration":"","msr_version":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_journal":"","msr_volume":"","msr_number":"","msr_editors":"","msr_series":"","msr_issue":"","msr_organization":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_notes":"","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":1,"msr_main_download":"","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_doi":"","msr_publication_uploader":[{"type":"file","viewUrl":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/asplos25.pdf","id":"1145958","title":"asplos25","label_id":"243109","label":0},{"type":"doi","viewUrl":"false","id":"false","title":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/3676641.3716247","label_id":"243106","label":0},{"type":"url","viewUrl":"false","id":"false","title":"https:\/\/dblp.org\/rec\/conf\/asplos\/FuTAKGAGSOS25.html","label_id":"243109","label":0}],"msr_related_uploader":"","msr_citation_count":0,"msr_citation_count_updated":"","msr_s2_paper_id":"","msr_influential_citations":0,"msr_reference_count":0,"msr_arxiv_id":"","msr_s2_author_ids":[],"msr_s2_open_access":false,"msr_s2_pdf_url":null,"msr_attachments":[{"id":1145958,"url":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/asplos25.pdf"}],"msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"text","value":"Bo Fu","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"text","value":"Leo Tenenbaum","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"text","value":"David Adler","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"text","value":"Assaf Klein","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"text","value":"Arpit Gogia","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"text","value":"Alaa R. Alameldeen","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"text","value":"Marco Guarnieri","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"text","value":"M. Silberstein","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Oleksii Oleksenko","user_id":43146,"rest_url":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Oleksii Oleksenko"},{"type":"text","value":"Gururaj Saileshwar","user_id":0,"rest_url":false}],"msr_impact_theme":[],"msr_research_lab":[199561],"msr_event":[],"msr_group":[559983,998211],"msr_project":[923382],"publication":[],"video":[],"msr-tool":[],"msr_publication_type":"inproceedings","related_content":{"projects":[{"ID":923382,"post_title":"Project Venice","post_name":"venice","post_type":"msr-project","post_date":"2023-03-24 09:06:03","post_modified":"2025-08-01 02:43:45","post_status":"publish","permalink":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/project\/venice\/","post_excerpt":"The goal of Project Venice is to provide strong end-to-end protection against software side-channel attacks, with confidential cloud computing as its main use case.","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-project\/923382"}]}}]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/1145956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/msr-research-item"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/1145956\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1145957,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/1145956\/revisions\/1145957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1145956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"msr-research-highlight","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-highlight?post=1145956"},{"taxonomy":"msr-research-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-area?post=1145956"},{"taxonomy":"msr-publication-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-publication-type?post=1145956"},{"taxonomy":"msr-publisher","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-publisher?post=1145956"},{"taxonomy":"msr-focus-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-focus-area?post=1145956"},{"taxonomy":"msr-locale","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-locale?post=1145956"},{"taxonomy":"msr-post-option","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-post-option?post=1145956"},{"taxonomy":"msr-field-of-study","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-field-of-study?post=1145956"},{"taxonomy":"msr-conference","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-conference?post=1145956"},{"taxonomy":"msr-journal","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-journal?post=1145956"},{"taxonomy":"msr-impact-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-impact-theme?post=1145956"},{"taxonomy":"msr-pillar","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-pillar?post=1145956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}