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Exploration and Exploitation of Hidden PMU Events

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arxiv 2304.12072 v1 pith:HPGEZA5W submitted 2023-04-24 cs.CR

classification cs.CR
keywords eventshiddencpuseventexploitationintelperformanceused
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Performance Monitoring Unit (PMU) is a common hardware module in Intel CPUs. It can be used to record various CPU behaviors therefore it is often used for performance analysis and optimization. Of the 65536 event spaces, Intel has officially published only 200 or so. In this paper, we design a hidden PMU event collection method. And we found a large number of undocumented PMU events in CPUs of Skylake, Kabylake, and Alderlake microarchitectures. We further demonstrate the existence of these events by using them for transient execution attack detection and build-side channel attacks. This also implies that these hidden PMU events have huge exploitation potential and security threats.

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Cited by 1 Pith paper

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. A Centralized Performance Monitoring Architecture for Heterogeneous Multicore SoCs

    cs.AR 2026-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A centralized EVU-APMU hardware architecture collects and processes performance counter data on a dedicated side processor, demonstrated on a RISC-V SoC for memory regulation and function-level profiling.

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