Revizor: Testing Black-Box CPUs against Speculation Contracts
The work
| Authors | Oleksii Oleksenko; Christof Fetzer; Boris Köpf; Mark Silberstein |
|---|---|
| Editors | |
| Type | inproceedings |
| Year | 2022 |
| Citekey | oleksenko2022revizor |
Where it appeared
| Published in | Proceedings of the 27th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS 2022) |
|---|---|
| Pages | 226--239 |
Identifiers
| arXiv | 2105.06872 from its landing_page_url |
|---|---|
| DOI | 10.1145/3503222.3507729 |
Access
| Landing page | https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.06872 |
|---|
Related
| Distinct from | fuchs2023architectural |
|---|---|
| Distinct from | guarnieri2020spectector |
| Distinct from | hossain2020transform |
| Distinct from | mosier2022axiomatic |
| Distinct from | oleksenko2025enter |
From bibtex.
Abstract
Speculative vulnerabilities such as Spectre and Meltdown expose speculative execution state that can be exploited to leak information across security domains via side-channels. Such vulnerabilities often stay undetected for a long time as we lack the tools for systematic testing of CPUs to find them. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically detect microarchitectural information leakage in commercial black-box CPUs. We build on speculation contracts, which we employ to specify the permitted side effects of program execution on the CPU’s microarchitectural state. We propose a Model-based Relational Testing (MRT) technique to empirically assess the CPU compliance with these specifications. We implement MRT in a testing framework called Revizor, and showcase its effectiveness on real Intel x86 CPUs. Revizor automatically detects violations of a rich set of contracts, or indicates their absence. A highlight of our findings is that Revizor managed to automatically surface Spectre, MDS, and LVI, as well as several previously unknown variants.
A copy is held
pdf, 747.2 kB. Not published — it may be under copyright. The facts and links here are.
How it got here
| How it got here | agent via bibtex |
|---|---|
| Added | 2026-09-18 05:13 UTC |
| Approved by | a person 2026-10-05 21:09 UTC |
Filed under
Cite it as
@inproceedings{oleksenko2022revizor,
title = {Revizor: Testing Black-Box CPUs against Speculation Contracts},
author = {Oleksii Oleksenko and Christof Fetzer and Boris Köpf and Mark Silberstein},
year = {2022},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 27th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS 2022)},
pages = {226--239},
doi = {10.1145/3503222.3507729},
}
This record lives at https://refs.drheap.org/oleksenko2022revizor/ and will keep doing so.