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1. Automatically eliminating speculative leaks from cryptographic code with blade

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3434330  

   Vassena, Marco; Disselkoen, Craig; Gleissenthall, Klaus von; Cauligi, Sunjay; Kıcı, Rami Gökhan; Jhala, Ranjit; Tullsen, Dean; Stefan, Deian (January 2021, Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages)

   null (Ed.)

   We introduce Blade, a new approach to automatically and efficiently eliminate speculative leaks from cryptographic code. Blade is built on the insight that to stop leaks via speculative execution, it suffices to cut the dataflow from expressions that speculatively introduce secrets ( sources ) to those that leak them through the cache ( sinks ), rather than prohibit speculation altogether. We formalize this insight in a static type system that (1) types each expression as either transient , i.e., possibly containing speculative secrets or as being stable , and (2) prohibits speculative leaks by requiring that all sink expressions are stable. Blade relies on a new abstract primitive, protect , to halt speculation at fine granularity. We formalize and implement protect using existing architectural mechanisms, and show how Blade’s type system can automatically synthesize a minimal number of protect s to provably eliminate speculative leaks. We implement Blade in the Cranelift WebAssembly compiler and evaluate our approach by repairing several verified, yet vulnerable WebAssembly implementations of cryptographic primitives. We find that Blade can fix existing programs that leak via speculation automatically , without user intervention, and efficiently even when using fences to implement protect . 

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2. Decoding Speculative Decoding

   https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.naacl-long.328  

   Yan, Minghao; Agarwal, Saurabh; Venkataraman, Shivaram (April 2025, Association for Computational Linguistics)
3. Harmonizing Speculative and Non-Speculative Execution in Architectures for Ordered Parallelism

   https://doi.org/10.1109/MICRO.2018.00026  

   Jeffrey, Mark C.; Ying, Victor A.; Subramanian, Suvinay; Lee, Hyun Ryong; Emer, Joel; Sanchez, Daniel (October 2018, Proceedings of the 51st Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO-51))

   Multicore systems should support both speculative and non-speculative parallelism. Speculative parallelism is easy to use and is crucial to scale many challenging applications, while non-speculative parallelism is more efficient and allows parallel irrevocable actions (e.g., parallel I/O). Unfortunately, prior techniques are far from this goal. Hardware transactional memory (HTM) systems support speculative (transactional) and non-speculative (non-transactional) work, but lack coordination mechanisms between the two, and are limited to unordered parallelism. Prior work has extended HTMs to avoid the limitations of speculative execution, e.g., through escape actions and open-nested transactions. But these mechanisms are incompatible with systems that exploit ordered parallelism, which parallelize a broader range of applications and are easier to use. We contribute two techniques that enable seamlessly composing and coordinating speculative and non-speculative work in the context of ordered parallelism: (i) a task-based execution model that efficiently coordinates concurrent speculative and non-speculative ordered tasks, allowing them to create tasks of either kind and to operate on shared data; and (ii) a safe way for speculative tasks to invoke software-managed speculative actions that avoid hardware version management and conflict detection. These contributions improve efficiency and enable new capabilities. Across several benchmarks, they allow the system to dynamically choose whether to execute tasks speculatively or non-speculatively, avoid needless conflicts among speculative tasks, and allow speculative tasks to safely invoke irrevocable actions. 

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4. SpecLock: Speculative Lock Forwarding

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCD46524.2019.00041  

   M. Yaghini, Pooria; Michelogiannakis, George; V. Gratz, Paul (November 2019, IEEE 37th International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD))
5. Shorting in Speculative Markets

   https://doi.org/10.1111/jofi.12871  

   NUTZ, MARCEL; SCHEINKMAN, JOSÉ A. (March 2020, The Journal of Finance)