Simon Blanco Ortiz
Implementing and Analyzing Speculative Privacy Tracking in the RISC-V Out-of-Order Core BOOM.
Rel. Matteo Sonza Reorda. Politecnico di Torino, Master of science program in Computer Engineering, 2026
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Abstract
Speculative execution is a key contributor to the performance of modern out-of-order processors, but it has been shown to enable transient execution attacks that leak sensitive data through microarchitectural side channels. While software-based mitigations exist, they incur significant performance overheads and provide incomplete protection. Hardware-based defenses offer a more transparent and robust approach, but remain challenging to implement and verify at the register-transfer level. This thesis presents SPT-BOOM, the first register-transfer level (RTL) implementation of Speculative Privacy Tracking (SPT) in an industry-grade superscalar out-of-order processor. SPT is software-transparent protection mechanism against transient execution leakage, which is integrated into BOOMv3, an open-source RISC-V core, and introduces several design adaptations to accommodate architectural constraints and support formal verification.
SPT-BOOM is evaluated in terms of performance, hardware overhead, and security
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