Dfence: Fine-Grained Speculation Barriers for Efficient and Effective Hardware-Software Protection in the Spectre Era (Extended Version)

Speculative execution attacks such as Spectre-PHT and Spectre-STL remain a critical security concern in modern processors. While software-based mitigations like Speculative Load Hardening SLH offer effective protection against Spectre-PHT, they are limited in scope and require software-managed...