Arm Barriers 101: Part #4: Speculation And Break-Before-Make

Defending against Spectre/Meltdown and performing break-before-make sequences.

What you'll learn

Discover how speculative side-channel attacks like Spectre and Meltdown work.

Explore how to use barriers to control speculation.

Investigate some of the nasty, horrible-to-debug issues that can occur when making certain modifications to the page tables.

Learn how to use barriers and break-before-make sequences to prevent these issues from occurring.

Requirements

Beginner friendly!

Assumes no prior Arm Architecture experience.

Some basic C/C++ programming experience is recommended, but not required.

Strongly recommended to take our "Arm Barriers 101: Part #3: Expanding our toolkit" course first.

Description

Welcome to Part 4 of our Barriers 101 training course, a comprehensive deep dive on barriers in the Arm® Architecture.This course is suitable for software engineers working on Arm-based platforms on system-level software, from down at the firmware layer all the way up through to the kernel, hypervisor, and device drivers.In these lessons, you'll learn:How speculative side-channel attacks like Spectre and Meltdown work.How we can use barriers to control speculation and to defend against these kinds of attacks.How failing to correctly perform break-before-make sequences when making certain modifications to the page tables may lead to all sorts of nasty, horrible-to-debug issues.How to use barriers to correctly perform such sequences.From beginner to expert: Our courses are suitable for all levels of experience, whether you're already a seasoned veteran of the Arm Architecture or you're seeing Arm Barriers for the very first time.How it really works: Our courses go both broader and deeper on the topic of barriers than anyone else; we show you how things really work, and more importantly, why.Learning is doing: Reinforce your learning with 30 multiple-choice quiz questions including a video walkthrough of each question and answer, followed by a full course revision session touching on every lesson from all four parts of the entire Barriers 101 training course.Recognised trainer: Our courses are written and produced by Ash Wilding, formerly one of Arm's lead technical trainers and a kernel engineer at both Amazon AWS and Apple.

Overview

Section 1: Spectre, Meltdown, and break-before-make

Lecture 1 Introduction to Spectre and Meltdown

Lecture 2 Controlling speculation through barriers

Lecture 3 Break-before-make sequences

Lecture 4 Quiz

Lecture 5 Barriers 101 full course revision session

Engineers at all experience levels working on Arm-based platforms.,Firmware Engineers.,Kernel Engineers.,Hypervisor Engineers.,Device Driver Engineers.