SECURITY ADVISORY FOR MELTDOWN & SPECTRE VULNERABILITIES
! SECURITY ADVISORY FOR MELTDOWN & SPECTRE VULNERABILITIES All machines every Intel processor which implements out-of-order execution is potentially affected by Meltdown vulnerability and all modern processors (Intel, AMD, and ARM processors) capable of keeping many instructions in flight are potentially vulnerable to the Spectre vulnerability. High level description: MELTDOWN The bug basically melts security boundaries which are normally enforced by the hardware. Meltdown exploits side effects of out-of-order execution on modern processors to read arbitrary kernel-memory locations including personal data and passwords. The attack is independent of the operating system, and it does not rely on any software vulnerabilities. SPECTRE The name is based on the root cause, speculative execution. Spectre attacks involve inducing a victim to speculatively perform operations that would not occur during correct program execution and which leak the victim’s confident