What are Meltdown and Spectre What are their security implication?

In the most basic definition, Spectre is a vulnerability allowing for arbitrary locations in the allocated memory of a program to be read. Meltdown is a vulnerability allowing a process to read all memory in a given system.

What processors does Spectre and Meltdown effect?

Even new Intel chips like the Core i7-8700K are affected by Meltdown and Spectre. Spectre affects AMD and ARM processors as well as Intel CPUs, which means mobile devices are also at risk.

What does Spectre do to a computer?

Spectre is an attack method which allows a hacker to “read over the shoulder” of a program it does not have access to. Using code, the hacker forces the program to pull up its encryption key allowing full access to the program.

How does Spectre and Meltdown work?

Meltdown and Spectre exploit critical vulnerabilities in modern processors . These hardware vulnerabilities allow programs to steal data which is currently processed on the computer. Meltdown and Spectre work on personal computers, mobile devices, and in the cloud.

Does Spectre and Meltdown affect AMD?

The Meltdown flaw, also called Spectre variant 3, affected both Intel and ARM CPUs. Spectre affects virtually all out-of-order CPUs that use speculative execution to increase performance, including AMD and Arm’s processors.

Does Spectre affect AMD?

The three new types of potential Spectre attacks affect all modern AMD and Intel processors with micro-op caches, according to a new paper from academics at the University of Virginia and University of California San Diego.

Are meltdown and Spectre fixed?

The patch process since January 2018 has been nothing short of boggling. Then at the end of January, Microsoft also announced that the Spectre and Meltdown patches for Windows 10 were compromising performance and causing random fatal errors, confirming that their security fixes were buggy.

How do I disable Spectre mitigation in Visual Studio?

To disable it in the Visual Studio IDE, open Properties for your projects, and in the Configuration Properties > C/C++ > Code Generation property page, set the Spectre Mitigations property to Disabled.

What is Spectre mitigation?

Spectre is a class of security vulnerabilities that affects modern microprocessors that perform branch prediction and other forms of speculation. On 8 October 2018, Intel is reported to have added hardware and firmware mitigations regarding Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities to its latest processors.

What are meltdown and Spectre and how do they affect cloud firms?

In the wake of the Meltdown and Spectre architectural flaws, cloud firms are scrambling to apply patches to these vulnerabilities. Both AMD and Intel processors are affected by the pair, but only Intel processors are vulnerable to all the attack variants.

Do architectural flaws in CPU vulnerabilities affect performance?

Mitigations for two critical architectural flaws in CPUs can cause performance degradation, but real-world impact is lower than synthetic benchmarks. In the wake of the Meltdown and Spectre architectural flaws, cloud firms are scrambling to apply patches to these vulnerabilities.

Is Meltdown the worst bug ever?

Meltdown is “probably one of the worst CPU bugs ever found”, said Daniel Gruss, one of the researchers at Graz University of Technology who discovered the flaw. What can I do about the Meltdown and Spectre flaws?

Is there a class action lawsuit against Intel?

Intel facing class-action lawsuits over Meltdown and Spectre bugs. Plaintiffs claim compensation for security flaws and alleged slowdown that fixing computers will cause, while corporations count cost of corrections. Published: 5 Jan 2018. Intel facing class-action lawsuits over Meltdown and Spectre bugs.