{"ID":2844870,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.05110","arxiv_id":"2511.05110","title":"PhantomFetch: Obfuscating Loads against Prefetcher Side-Channel Attacks","abstract":"The IP-stride prefetcher has recently been exploited to leak secrets through side-channel attacks. It, however, cannot be simply disabled for security with prefetching speedup as a sacrifice. The state-of-the-art defense tries to retain the prefetching effect by hardware modification. In this paper, we present PhantomFetch as the first prefetching-retentive and hardware-agnostic defense. It avoids potential remanufacturing cost and enriches applicability to off-the-shelf devices. The key idea is to directly break the exploitable coupling between trained prefetcher entries and the victim's secret-dependent loads by obfuscating the sensitive load effects of the victim. The experiment results show that PhantomFetch can secure the IP-stride prefetcher with only negligible overhead.","short_abstract":"The IP-stride prefetcher has recently been exploited to leak secrets through side-channel attacks. It, however, cannot be simply disabled for security with prefetching speedup as a sacrifice. The state-of-the-art defense tries to retain the prefetching effect by hardware modification. In this paper, we present PhantomF...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.05110","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05110v2","authors":"[\"Xingzhi Zhang\",\"Buyi Lv\",\"Yimin Lu\",\"Kai Bu\"]","published":"2025-11-07T09:50:44Z","proceeding":"cs.CR","tasks":"[\"cs.CR\",\"cs.AR\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}