{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/smotherspectre-exploiting-speculative","title":"SMoTherSpectre: exploiting speculative execution through port contention","arxiv_id":"1903.01843","date":"2019-03-05","proceeding":null,"authors":["Atri Bhattacharyya","Alexandra Sandulescu","Matthias Neugschwandtner","Alessandro Sorniotti","Babak Falsafi","Mathias Payer","Anil Kurmus"],"abstract":"Spectre, Meltdown, and related attacks have demonstrated that kernels, hypervisors, trusted execution environments, and browsers are prone to information disclosure through micro-architectural weaknesses. However, it remains unclear as to what extent other applications, in particular those that do not load attacker-provided code, may be impacted. It also remains unclear as to what extent these attacks are reliant on cache-based side channels. We introduce SMoTherSpectre, a speculative code-reuse attack that leverages port-contention in simultaneously multi-threaded processors (SMoTher) as a side channel to leak information from a victim process. SMoTher is a fine-grained side channel that detects contention based on a single victim instruction. To discover real-world gadgets, we describe a methodology and build a tool that locates SMoTher-gadgets in popular libraries. In an evaluation on glibc, we found hundreds of gadgets that can be used to leak information. Finally, we demonstrate proof-of-concept attacks against the OpenSSH server, creating oracles for determining four host key bits, and against an application performing encryption using the OpenSSL library, creating an oracle which can differentiate a bit of the plaintext through gadgets in libcrypto and glibc.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1903.01843v1","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.01843v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"smotherspectre-exploiting-speculative","repo_url":"https://github.com/HexHive/SMoTherSpectre","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"smotherspectre-exploiting-speculative","repo_url":"https://github.com/google/safeside","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"smotherspectre-exploiting-speculative","repo_url":"https://github.com/plsyssec/safeside","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}