Instruct: Identify the main and secondary category of Arxiv papers based on the titles and abstracts
Query: An Exploratory Analysis of Microcode as a Building Block for System
  Defenses   Microcode is an abstraction layer used by modern x86 processors that
interprets user-visible CISC instructions to hardware-internal RISC
instructions. The capability to update x86 microcode enables a vendor to modify
CPU behavior in-field, and thus patch erroneous microarchitectural processes or
even implement new features. Most prominently, the recent Spectre and Meltdown
vulnerabilities were mitigated by Intel via microcode updates. Unfortunately,
microcode is proprietary and closed source, and there is little publicly
available information on its inner workings.
  In this paper, we present new reverse engineering results that extend and
complement the public knowledge of proprietary microcode. Based on these novel
insights, we show how modern system defenses and tools can be realized in
microcode on a commercial, off-the-shelf AMD x86 CPU. We demonstrate how
well-established system security defenses such as timing attack mitigations,
hardware-assisted address sanitization, and instruction set randomization can
be realized in microcode. We also present a proof-of-concept implementation of
a microcode-assisted instrumentation framework. Finally, we show how a secure
microcode update mechanism and enclave functionality can be implemented in
microcode to realize a small trusted execution environment. All microcode
programs and the whole infrastructure needed to reproduce and extend our
results are publicly available.

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The categories of this paper are: plasm-ph
19
The categories of this paper are: eess
3
The categories of this paper are: physics
22
The categories of this paper are: chao-dyn
25
The categories of this paper are: patt-sol
0
The categories of this paper are: hep-ph
9
The categories of this paper are: nlin
8
The categories of this paper are: hep-ex
29
The categories of this paper are: funct-an
16
The categories of this paper are: stat
14
The categories of this paper are: math-ph
21
The categories of this paper are: adap-org
17
The categories of this paper are: q-fin
37
The categories of this paper are: supr-con
34
The categories of this paper are: chem-ph
35
The categories of this paper are: mtrl-th