Papers › Shesha: Multi-head Microarchitectural Leakage Discovery in new-generation Intel Processors
Shesha: Multi-head Microarchitectural Leakage Discovery in new-generation Intel Processors
Anirban Chakraborty, Nimish Mishra, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Transient execution attacks have been one of the widely explored microarchitectural side channels since the discovery of Spectre and Meltdown. However, much of the research has been driven by manual discovery of new transient paths through well-known speculative events. Although a few attempts exist in literature on automating transient leakage discovery, such tools focus on finding variants of known transient attacks and explore a small subset of instruction set. Further, they take a random fuzzing approach that does not scale as the complexity of search space increases. In this work, we identify that the search space of bad speculation is disjointedly fragmented into equivalence classes, and then use this observation to develop a framework named Shesha, inspired by Particle Swarm Optimization, which exhibits faster convergence rates than state-of-the-art fuzzing techniques for automatic discovery of transient execution attacks. We then use Shesha to explore the vast search space of extensions to the x86 Instruction Set Architecture (ISAs), thereby focusing on previously unexplored avenues of bad speculation. As such, we report five previously unreported transient execution paths in Instruction Set Extensions (ISEs) on new generation of Intel processors. We then perform extensive reverse engineering of each of the transient execution paths and provide root-cause analysis. Using the discovered transient execution paths, we develop attack building blocks to exhibit exploitable transient windows. Finally, we demonstrate data leakage from Fused Multiply-Add instructions through SIMD buffer and extract victim data from various cryptographic implementations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections