MAMBO-V: Dynamic Side-Channel Leakage Analysis on RISC-V

MAMBO-V is a specialized security research tool that ports the MAMBO dynamic binary instrumentation (DBI) framework (originally for ARM) to RISC-V to address the growing need for side-channel analysis in the RISC-V ecosystem. Quantitatively, the project shows zero stars and 5 forks over a three-year period, which strongly suggests it is a academic research artifact (linked to arXiv:2305.00584) rather than a production-grade tool. Its defensibility is low (3) because while it requires deep domain expertise in microarchitecture and binary instrumentation to build, it lacks a community, user base, or ongoing maintenance that would create a moat. It is primarily a reference implementation for the methodology described in the paper. Frontier labs like OpenAI or Google are unlikely to build this directly as it is too niche; however, hardware-focused labs or cloud providers (AWS, Tenstorrent) are more likely to integrate similar logic into their proprietary validation pipelines. The displacement horizon is 1-2 years because newer research tools, particularly those utilizing hardware-assisted tracing or formal verification (like those from the SEL4 or Gallina ecosystems), are likely to supersede dynamic analysis tools which often suffer from performance overhead and incomplete coverage.