PROCESSOR INSTRUCTION SUPPORT FOR MITIGATING CONTROLLED-CHANNEL AND CACHE-BASED SIDE-CHANNEL ATTACKS

Detailed herein are systems, apparatuses, and methods for a computer architecture with instruction set support to mitigate against page fault and/or cache-based side-channel attacks. In an embodiment, a processor includes a decoder to decode an instruction into a decoded instruction, the instruction comprising a first field that indicates an instruction pointer to a user-level event handler; and an execution unit to execute the decoded instruction to, after a swap of an instruction pointer that indicates where an event occurred from a current instruction pointer register into a user-level event handler pointer register, push the instruction pointer that indicates where the event occurred onto call stack storage, and change a current instruction pointer in the current instruction pointer register to the instruction pointer to the user-level event handler.