microarch-analysis

What problem does it solve?

This Skill helps identify and mitigate security vulnerabilities arising from the microarchitectural design of hardware components, protecting against sophisticated side-channel and speculative execution attacks.

Core Features & Use Cases

• Vulnerability Mapping: Identifies shared hardware structures (caches, branch predictors) that can be exploited.
• Attack Vector Enumeration: Details known attack classes like cache timing, transient execution, and speculative execution.
• Countermeasure Proposal: Suggests hardware, microcode, and software mitigations.
• Use Case: A security researcher can use this Skill to analyze a new CPU design, mapping potential side-channel leakage points and proposing design changes to harden it against Spectre-class vulnerabilities.

Quick Start

Analyze the microarchitectural attack surfaces of the system, focusing on cache timing and speculative execution vectors.