Goals

This is intended to be a community-run set of guidelines for:

• Evaluation of microarchitectural attacks
• Evaluation of microarchitectural defenses
• Guidelines for ensuring reproducibility of the above

Our process is inspired by the excellent SIGPLAN guidelines, which we intend to extend with microarchitecture-specific guidelines.

If you are a paper author or reviewer, this can be treated as a starting point for a rubric. Depending on the mechanism, more details may be required (e.g. the specific configuration of DIMMs or the GPU model and driver version.)

Please submit PRs to improve guidelines!

General guidelines

These guidelines are meant to support judgement, not supplant it.

All works should report the following:

Platform reporting

• CPU SKU (Exact model)
• CPU microcode version
• Amount and speed of DRAM
• Operating system, and exact version/patch

Example

• Intel Xeon Gold 6312U CPU
• microcode v0xd000375
• 512GB of DDR4 (3200MHz)
• Ubuntu Linux 22.04.3, kernel 5.15.0-86-generic

Setup reporting

• Scheduling configuration, including any core pinning

Example

Benchmarking

We strongly encourage reading Gernot Heiser's discussion of benchmarking errors and the security relevant follow up.

Attack evaluation guidelines

Defense evaluation guidelines

Reproducibility