The recent Meltdown and Spectre attacks have highlighted that modern processors are likely being shipped with latent vulnerabilities that are impossible to anticipate. Some of these vulnerabilities can be addressed with various hardware defenses. Meltdown and Spectre may have finally pushed these defenses from the shadows of academia into possible commercial reality.

This talk will describe three primary vulnerabilities in the memory system, and efficient hardware defenses to address each of these vulnerabilities. The first vulnerability is leakage of a program's memory intensity through memory controller timing channels. The second is leakage of a program's memory access pattern through exposed DDR buses. The third is a violation of memory integrity by a malicious cloud operator or malicious OS. In fact, modern Intel SGX systems already have support for guaranteed memory integrity and we show how the performance of that solution can be improved by nearly 4X.