Inception

This is the artifact of Inception: Exposing New Attack Surfaces with Training in Transient Execution, published at USENIX Security 2023. Inception is a novel transient execution attack that leaks arbitrary data on all AMD Zen CPUs, in the presence of all software- and hardware mitigations deployed to date. More information about Inception can be found here.

Organization

This artifact is split up in five parts.

• tte_btb determines whether the BTB can be manipulated in transient execution. To run this experiments, arch.sh should be configured.

• tte_rsb determines whether the RSB can be manipulated in transient execution. It may be necessary to run this experiment with the -no-pie CLANG argument.

• phantomcall shows that the RSB can be manipulated with a recursive PhantomCALL on all AMD Zen microarchitectures. It may be necessary to run this experiment with the -no-pie CLANG argument.

• inception leaks data of any arbitrary provided address on AMD Zen 1(+), Zen 2 and Zen 4 microarchitectures.

• ibpb-eval evaluates the overhead of using IBPB as a mitigation against Inception.