Résumé
Can we trust architectural simulators to predict real-world security vulnerabilities? This work utilizes gem5 cycle-accurate simulation to dissect the side-channel leakage of specific AES-NI hardware instructions. By analyzing opcodes like AESENC and AESKEYGENASSIST, we achieved an 89% key recovery rate in simulation, closely mirroring results on physical Intel hardware (96%). Our findings provide a roadmap for identifying microarchitectural footprints and hardening software against Flush+Reload attacks before the code ever touches physical silicon.