On Building the Data-Oblivious Virtual Environment

software must be hardened to block a plethora of microarchitectural side channels (e.g., [11], [65], [73], [76]). Yet, existing software-based techniques to block these channels—coming from a rich line of research in data-oblivious/constant-time programming [8], [20], [51], [59]—fall short of protecting existing high-level language stacks such as R, Ruby and Python. Specifically, these techniques typically require experts to manually code core routines [8], [9], require the use of custom domain-specific languages [13], [63], or only apply to close-to-metal compiled languages [51], [59].