18–20 Sept 2024
Europe/Vienna timezone

Attack vector controls for speculation mitigations

20 Sept 2024, 15:20
20m
"Room 1.31-1.32" (Austria Center)

"Room 1.31-1.32"

Austria Center

123
x86 Microconference x86 MC

Speaker

David Kaplan (AMD)

Description

There are currently more than a dozen command line options related to x86 CPU speculation bugs, and it takes a security expert to understand them all and when they can be safely disabled. This talk will discuss a recent RFC that proposes simpler “attack vector” based controls which would allow admins to select a set of mitigation options based on how the system is being used. For instance, if the system only runs trusted VMs, then guest-to-host mitigations should be disabled. The goal is to make it easier to select appropriate and consistent mitigation options, and potentially recover lost performance.

Primary author

Presentation materials