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Hardware-Software Leakage Contracts

Concept

**Hardware-software leakage contracts** are a formalism for specifying the side-channel security guarantees that a modern processor provides to software. They are intended to define what information a processor implementation is allowed to leak through microarchitectural behavior, thereby giving a basis for checking whether hardware conforms to an expected security contract.[^e1]

First seen 5/24/2026
Last seen 5/26/2026
Evidence 2 chunks
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WIKI

Hardware-Software Leakage Contracts

Hardware-software leakage contracts are a formalism for specifying the side-channel security guarantees that a modern processor provides to software. They are intended to define what information a processor implementation is allowed to leak through microarchitectural behavior, thereby giving a basis for checking whether hardware conforms to an expected security contract.[1]

Purpose

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The fuzzing technique is based on hardware-software leakage contracts as the specification for security guarantees.
Spectre mentions → 90% 2e
Spectre is mentioned as an example of information leaks that hardware fuzzing approaches are blind to, motivating the use of leakage contracts.