TREVEX: A Black-Box Detection Framework For Data-Flow Transient Execution Vulnerabilities

Abstract

Transient execution attacks continue to pose serious security risks, even years after their initial discovery in the form of Meltdown and Spectre. Despite growing awareness and research, most attacks have been discovered manually. Existing automated approaches only focus on variants of known attacks or make strict assumptions, such as access to the CPU's RTL, a given leakage contract, or an ISA emulator. These limitations hinder broader and more generic detection, especially in post-silicon environments. In this paper, we present TREVEX, a post-silicon black-box detection framework designed to discover data-flow transient execution vulnerabilities automatically. TREVEX does not rely on RTL access or semantics of the ISA. Instead, TREVEX detects any unexpected transient data flow between different execution contexts by employing novel techniques informed by insights from prior transient execution attacks. We evaluate TREVEX across 20 microarchitectures from Intel, AMD, and Zhaoxin. Hereby, TREVEX discovers Floating Point Divider State Sampling (FP-DSS), a novel transient execution attack affecting AMD CPUs. We show that FP-DSS allows an unprivileged attacker and even a malicious website to leak data from different security domains, including the operating system. TREVEX further discovers a new variant of FPVI on AMD CPUs and that Zhaoxin CPUs are affected by FPVI. Our study shows that TREVEX detects known vulnerabilities on affected CPUs, while also closing gaps in existing vendor documentation. Our findings highlight the urgent need for more diverse automated tools and demonstrate that TREVEX fills an important gap in current CPU vulnerability research.