USING WEAK MEMORY MODELS TO UNCOVER VULNERABLE MICROARCHITECTURAL BEHAVIOUR

Many recent side-channel attacks have focused on exposing microarchitectural behaviour to gain knowledge of the system state that is traditionally hidden from the user. In some cases, the mechanisms involved are also responsible for observed weak memory behaviour. This project seeks to use existing weak memory tools and models to expose further microarchitectural weaknesses that would allow for potential security attacks, along with proposed mitigations against them.