SPLASH: SPeculative Leakage-Adaptive Secure Hardware

Paper 2026/677 SPLASH: SPeculative Leakage-Adaptive Secure Hardware Abstract Modern processors are largely fixed at the time of fabrication, rendering post-silicon security updates infeasible. This lack of flexibility is especially problematic for speculative execution attacks, which exploit microarchitectural optimizations to leak sensitive information through transient execution. However, existing defenses are typically hardwired, narrowly scoped, and non-adaptive. Once deployed, these...