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Microcode is an abstraction layer on top of the physical components of a CPUand present in most general-purpose CPUs today. In addition to facilitatecomplex and vast instruction sets, it also provides an update mechanism thatallows CPUs to be patched in-place without requiring any special hardware.While it is well-known that CPUs are regularly updated with this mechanism,very little is known about its inner workings given that microcode and theupdate mechanism are proprietary and have not been throughly analyzed yet.  In this paper, we reverse engineer the microcode semantics and inner workingsof its update mechanism of conventional COTS CPUs on the example of AMD's K8and K10 microarchitectures. Furthermore, we demonstrate how to develop custommicrocode updates. We describe the microcode semantics and additionally presenta set of microprograms that demonstrate the possibilities offered by thistechnology. To this end, our microprograms range from CPU-assistedinstrumentation to microcoded Trojans that can even be reached from within aweb browser and enable remote code execution and cryptographic implementationattacks.

Reverse Engineering x86 Processor Microcode