ShadowLoad: Injecting State into Hardware Prefetchers
Hardware prefetchers are an optimization in modern CPUs that predict memory accesses and preemptively load the corresponding value into the cache. Previous work showed that the internal state of hardware prefetchers can act as a side channel, leaking information across security boundaries such as processes, user and kernel space, and even trusted execution environments.
Authors
- Ruiyi Zhang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0007-9094-6412)
- Edward S. Ebert
- Michael Schwarz (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6744-3410)
- Lorenz Hetterich (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0007-1201-0299)
- Nils Bernsdorf (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-4550-1810)
- Fabian Thomas (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-8029-0621)
- L. O. Gerlach (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-6684-2035)
Institutions
- Helmholtz Center for Information Security (DE)
Publication Details
- Published
- 2025-03-27
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3676641.3716020
- Citations
- 4
- Primary Topic
- Security and Verification in Computing
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 9.92