The Price of Meltdown and Spectre: Energy Overhead of Mitigations at Operating System Level

Herzog B, Reif S, Preis J, Schröder-Preikschat W, Hönig T (2021)

Publication Type: Conference contribution

Publication year: 2021

Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery, Inc

Pages Range: 8-14

Conference Proceedings Title: EuroSec 2021 - Proceedings of the 14th European Workshop on Systems

Event location: Online GB

ISBN: 9781450383370

DOI: 10.1145/3447852.3458721

Abstract

The Meltdown and Spectre hardware vulnerabilities shocked hardware manufacturers and system users upon discovery. Numerous attack vectors and mitigations have been developed and deployed. However, due to the deep entanglement in core CPU components they will be an important topic for years. Although the performance overhead of software mitigations has been examined closely, the energy overhead has experienced little attention - -even though the energy demand is a critical cost factor in data centres. This work contributes a fine-grained energy-overhead analysis of Meltdown/Spectre software mitigations, which reveals application-specific energy overheads of up to 72 %. We further compare energy overheads to execution time overheads. Additionally, we examine subsystem-specific effects (i.e., CPU, memory, I/O, network/interprocess communication) and develop a model that predicts energy overheads for applications.

Authors with CRIS profile

Benedict Herzog Lehrstuhl für Informatik 4 (Verteilte Systeme und Betriebssysteme) Stefan Reif Lehrstuhl für Informatik 4 (Verteilte Systeme und Betriebssysteme) Julian Preis Lehrstuhl für Informatik 4 (Verteilte Systeme und Betriebssysteme) Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat Lehrstuhl für Informatik 4 (Verteilte Systeme und Betriebssysteme)

Involved external institutions

Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) DE Germany (DE)

How to cite

APA:

Herzog, B., Reif, S., Preis, J., Schröder-Preikschat, W., & Hönig, T. (2021). The Price of Meltdown and Spectre: Energy Overhead of Mitigations at Operating System Level. In EuroSec 2021 - Proceedings of the 14th European Workshop on Systems (pp. 8-14). Online, GB: Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.

MLA:

Herzog, Benedict, et al. "The Price of Meltdown and Spectre: Energy Overhead of Mitigations at Operating System Level." Proceedings of the 14th European Workshop on Systems, EuroSec 2021, Online Association for Computing Machinery, Inc, 2021. 8-14.

BibTeX: Download