Performance Evolution of Mitigating Transient Execution Attacks

Abstract

Today's applications pay a performance penalty for mitigations to protect against transient execution attacks such as Meltdown [32] and Spectre [25]. Such a reduction in performance directly translates to higher operating costs and degraded user experience. This paper measures the performance impact of these mitigations across a range of processors from multiple vendors and across several security boundaries to identify trends over successive generations of processors and to attribute how much of the overall slowdown is caused by each individual mitigation. We find that overheads for operating system intensive workloads have declined by as much as 10×, down to about 3% on modern CPUs, due to hardware changes that eliminate the need for the most expensive mitigations. Meanwhile, a JavaScript benchmark reveals approximately 20% overhead persists today because mitigations for Spectre V1 and Speculative Store Bypass have not become more efficient. Other workloads like virtual machines and single-process, compute-intensive applications did not show significant slowdowns on any of the processors we measured.