SecSMT: Securing SMT Processors against Contention-Based Covert Channels

This paper presents the first comprehensive analysis of contention-based security vulnerabilities in a high-performance simultaneous mulithreaded (SMT) processor. It features a characterization of contention throughout the shared pipeline, and potential resulting leakage channels for each resource. Further, it presents a set of unified mitigation/isolation strategies that dramatically cut that leakage while preserving most of the performance of a full, insecure SMT implementation. These results lay the groundwork for considering SMT execution, with its performance benefits, a reasonable choice even for security-sensitive applications.