Presenter: Ren Quinn
Authors: Damen Maughan, Ren Quinn
Faculty Advisor: Ren Quinn
Institution: Dixie State University
Spectre [1] is a CPU-level exploit that takes advantage of speculative execution to read secret data within the program space of a victim program. The process iterates through the victim program space, very slowly reading a single byte at a time. We propose a method for improving the speed by which Spectre can read secret data. Instead of reading an entire byte at a time, requiring 255 cache misses per byte, we split it up into 8 separate bits, requiring up to 8 cache misses per byte. By showing a faster method by which Spectre can read data, we expand the scope of possible ways to utilize this attack and thus reaffirm its seriousness.