Spectre is the first in a new class of security vulnerabilities which require programmers and the compiler to deal with microarchitectural details made visible during speculative execution. There are several API options which allow programmers to mitigate specific branches or pointers that are vulnerable to Spectre v1 in order to limit the performance impact of mitigation. In this talk, Devin and Zola will describe the unusual challenges in designing and implementing fine-grained Spectre (variant 1) mitigations, give an overview and demo of the APIs that exist today, and discuss the future of the APIs including the standardization proposal that is in progress.
