Macro-threats on microarchitectures (I'MTech)

22 September 2025

Processor vulnerabilities are no longer limited to the microarchitecural flaws identified in recent years. They now extend to different contexts and directly affect our digital uses.

Faced with these increasingly widespread threats, research in security is mobilizing and multiplying approaches to better understand and address them. Maria Mushtaq, researcher at Télécom Paris and organizer of the MIC-SEC winter school (1-5 December, 2025), sheds light on these developments and the challenges of a field in full transformation.

Since 2022, what has really changed in microarchitectural security?

Maria Mushtaq: The field has broadened and become more structured. It is no longer limited to cache-based side channels — caches being those small ultra-fast memories that temporarily store the most frequently used data but also leave exploitable traces. Overall, leakages have become more widespread, exploiting the complexity of multiple subsystems at once.

Research now focuses on microarchitectural components like branch predictors, which guess the next instruction in a program; speculative execution, which runs instructions in advance to save time but leaves residual information; or instruction fetch units. There is also a growing body of work targeting memory-related components such as the TLB (Translation Lookaside Buffer) and the DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) row-buffer. All these mechanisms are now analyzed using formal models and simulators to detect vulnerabilities earlier. […]

Full story on I'MTech, science news from IMT