Common Contracts
1 similar null contracts
∗Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UKSeptember 21st, 2023
Abstract—We propose architectural contracts that specify the allowable limits of speculative execution to enable both software safety guarantees and hardware verification. Transient-execution attacks have presented a major threat in recent years, driving deployment of software mitigations and research into hardware solutions. Recent work on hardware/software contracts for se- cure speculation recognizes the need for cooperation between hardware guarantees and software analysis, and demonstrates that speculative execution models can enable formal analysis of programs with respect to transient-execution vulnerabilities. Therefore, we have extended these limited models into com- prehensive architecture-level contracts that can be verified at a microarchitecture level. We define a set of speculation contracts for translation (TSC) and branching (BSC), and for memory ordering (MOSC). We also develop a set of directed-random test routines that reproduce all known contract violations in a pro
