uGen: An Agentic Framework for Generating Microarchitectural Attack PoCs
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance
Abstract (arXiv)
Microarchitectural attacks continue to evolve, uncovering new exploitation vectors in modern processors. From a defensive perspective, assessing a system's susceptibility to such attacks remains challenging. Developing functional attack implementations is labor-intensive, requires deep microarchitectural expertise, and is highly sensitive to execution environments. Consequently, existing attacks often lack portability, limiting systematic and scalable vulnerability assessment. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) suggest a potential avenue for lowering these barriers. However, it remains unclear whether LLMs can reliably generate functionally correct microarchitectural attack code suitable for rigorous vulnerability testing. In this work, we present uGen, the first LLM-driven framework for automated microarchitectural attack code generation. A key challenge we address is identifying attack-specific knowledge gaps in LLMs. Through a systematic study of state-of-the-art models (GPT, Claude, and Qwen3), we find that LLMs frequently misgenerate or misplace critical attack primitives. Guided by this analysis, uGen employs a retrieval-augmented, multi-agent design that injects missing domain knowledge to synthesize functionally correct microarchitectural attack PoCs tailored to defender requirements. We evaluate uGen on cache-based and speculative-execution attacks across diverse set of microarchitectures, vulnerable functions, and LLM platforms. In the deployment stage, uGen achieves up to 100% success rate for Spectre-v1 (Claude Sonnet-4) and 80% for Prime+Probe (Qwen3-Coder). Finally, we demonstrate that uGen can generate a successful PoC code with a cost of 1.25 in under four minutes.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 32 of its 60 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 15 May 2026.
Builds on
32 of 60 references.
Closest ancestors · 7
Same direction, newest first
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Other references · 25
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- 2018Spectre Attacks: Exploiting Speculative Executioncited by 47
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- 2018ret2spec: Speculative Execution Using Return Stack Bufferscited by 1
- 2025SMaCk: Efficient Instruction Cache Attacks via Self-Modifying Code Conflictscited by 1
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