The AMD Branch (Mis)predictor: Just Set it and Forget it!

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 00:00:00 -0500

In this blog post, OSS Security Researcher Pawel Wieczorkiewicz goes on a deep dive following a recent investigation of his into the behavior of AMD's branch predictor and how it relates to Spectre v1 exploitation. He details the discovery that due to this behavior, Spectre v1 gadgets can be exploited much more easily on modern AMD CPUs than was previously understood. He also covers the viability of vendor-recommended mitigations and the nebulous nature of Spectre v1 gadgets themselves.