Industry Expert Blogs
Building a More Secure World with the RISC-V ISA-January 8, 2018 |
Recent articles in the media have raised awareness around the processor security vulnerabilities named Meltdown and Spectre. These vulnerabilities are particularly troubling as they are not due to a bug in a particular processor implementation, but are a consequence of the widespread technique of speculative execution. Many generations of processors with different ISAs and from several different manufacturers are susceptible to the attacks, which exploit the fact that instructions speculatively executed on incorrectly predicted code paths can leave observable changes in micro-architectural state even though the instructions’ architectural state changes will be undone once the branch prediction is found incorrect. No announced RISC-V silicon is susceptible, and the popular open-source RISC-V Rocket processor is unaffected as it does not perform memory accesses speculatively.