Spectre attacks exploit serious vulnerabilities in modern CPU design to extract sensitive data through side channels. Completely fixing the problem would require a redesign of the architecture for conditional execution which cannot be backported. Researchers have proposed to detect Spectre with promising accuracy by monitoring deviations in microarchitectural events using existing hardware performance counters. However, the attacker may attempt to evade detection by reshaping the microarchitectural profile of Spectre so as to mimic benign programs. This letter thus identifies the challenges in detecting “Evasive Spectre” attacks by showing that the detection accuracy drops significantly after the attacker inserted carefully chosen instructions in the middle of an attack or periodically put the attack to sleep at a frequency higher than the victim's sampling rate when operating the attack at a lower bandwidth, yet with reasonable success rate.

中文翻译：

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检测“躲避幽灵”的挑战

Spectre 攻击利用现代 CPU 设计中的严重漏洞通过侧信道提取敏感数据。完全解决这个问题需要重新设计无法向后移植的条件执行架构。研究人员已提议通过使用现有硬件性能计数器监控微架构事件中的偏差，以有希望的准确度检测 Spectre。但是，攻击者可能会尝试通过重塑 Spectre 的微架构配置文件以模仿良性程序来逃避检测。