Shesha: Multi-head Microarchitectural Leakage Discovery in New-generation Intel Processors

Watch a 13-minute conference presentation from USENIX Security '24 exploring an innovative framework called Shesha for discovering microarchitectural vulnerabilities in modern Intel processors. Learn how researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur developed a Particle Swarm Optimization-inspired approach to automatically identify transient execution attacks, particularly focusing on previously unexplored Instruction Set Extensions. Discover five newly reported transient execution paths, their detailed reverse engineering analysis, and practical demonstrations of data leakage exploitation through SIMD buffer in cryptographic implementations. Understand how Shesha's methodology improves upon traditional fuzzing techniques by recognizing fragmented equivalence classes in bad speculation search spaces, leading to faster convergence rates in vulnerability detection.