A.-T. Le et al., "A cross-process Spectre attack via cache on RISC-V processor with trusted execution environment"¹

The trust execution environment (TEE) provides a safe region, also known as a secret enclave, for executing private programs that need protection. This work proposed a cross-process exploitation scheme for conducting the cache side-channel attack, Spectre, on RISC-V processors with a trust execution environment. Practical experiments are provided to verify the protected enclave’s security on RISC-V processors with the TEE. In these experiments, the attacker and victim do not share the same address space as in known implementations but are executed in separate processes. The experimental results show that initial leakage information from the cache memory can be recorded. To the best of our knowledge, no prior research has been conducted on the Spectre attack against RISC-V’s TEE. This implementation will be a critical component for extending further cache side-channel experiments on the security of RISC-V processors.

#ResearchPapers #RISCV #TEE #TrustedExecutionEnvironment #Spectre #NotJamesBondSpectre

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¹ sciencedirect.com/science/arti…

here is the 1995 paper that the #Spectre paper published in 2019 cites - and don't forget the research was funded by the NSA:

An in-depth analysis of the 80x86 processor families identifies architectural properties that may have unexpected, and undesirable, results in secure computer systems. In addition, reported implementation errors in some processor versions render them undesirable for secure systems because of potential security and reliability problems. In this paper, we discuss the imbalance in scrutiny for hardware protection mechanisms relative to software, and why this imbalance is increasingly difficult to justify as hardware complexity increases. We illustrate this difficulty with examples of architectural subtleties and reported implementation errors.

citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/…

Sibert, O., Porras, P. A., & Lindell, R. (1995, May). The intel 80x86 processor architecture: pitfalls for secure systems. In Proceedings 1995 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (pp. 211-222). IEEE.

#infosec