octopus/README.md

OCTOPUS
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Samuel AUBERTIN - EURECOM - 2022

![SPECTRE Octopus Logo](logo.png "SPECTRE Octopus Logo")

**OCTOPUS** is a [Spectre](https://spectreattack.com/spectre.pdf) V1 (_Bounds Check Bypass_) + V2 (_Branch Target Injection_) compiler flag tester.

It measures the success rate of the attacks using different compilers:

- GCC
- CLANG 

And compilation/linking flags such as:

- Optimisation levels (```-O```)
- Static/dynamic linking
- Masking and lfence as mitigation against Spectre V1
- RETPOLINE as mitigation against Spectre V2

## Results

Results are stored as JSON objects in an unique file for each run, following this pattern: ```result-$(UUID).json```

## Dependencies

- ```clang``` and ```lld```
- ```gcc```
- ```sftp```
- ```uuid```
- The libC static symbols: ```glibc-static```

## Execution

Will build, execute and upload the results.

```make```

### Build only 

```make [-j XXX] build``` where ```XXX``` is the number of parallel processes.

## Results aggregation

Results are automatically uploaded to a server with a dedicated account using ```sftp```.

Here is an exhaustive list of the data sent:
- CPU model name and microcode version.
- Kernel version and compilation date.
- GCC and clang versions.
- The list of mitigations enabled at runtime.
- The cache timings of the processor computed by the ```calibrate_threshold()``` function.
- Each spectre execution success rate.

**NONE** of this data will be used for anyhting else except this experiment.

## References

Both implementations are heavily inspired by:

- [ErikAugust gist](https://gist.github.com/ErikAugust/724d4a969fb2c6ae1bbd7b2a9e3d4bb6)
- [genua GmbH PoC](https://github.com/genua/meltdown)