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I am confused, as far as I know two different vulnerabilities have been discovered, Meltdown and Spectre; while the first one affects only Intel CPUs, the secon
by mastazi 9y ago
I am confused, as far as I know two different vulnerabilities have been discovered, Meltdown and Spectre; while the first one affects only Intel CPUs, the second one affects AMD and ARM as well. So how come I'm not seeing much talk around about the latter? Is it because it is harder to exploit?
I didn't have a chance to read the 2 papers so I would appreciate a TL;DR.
I am a SW developer working with high level languages; security and OS development are not my specific fields so while I don't need an ELI5 I would appreciate a sufficiently "layman's terms" explanation.
- mastazi 9y agoReplying to myself: most of the info can be found here * https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com.au/2018/01/reading-privileged-memory-with-side.html https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com.au/2018/01/reading-pr... * https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/02/intel_cpu_design_flaw/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/02/intel_cpu_design_fl... * https://meltdownattack.com/ https://meltdownattack.com/ * https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/speculative-execution https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/speculative-execution * https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-responds-to-security-research-findings/ https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-responds-to-security-r... TL;DR is that mitigation for Spectre on an OS level is not very expensive in terms of performance while Meltdown mitigation, which affects only Intel, will have a performance penalty between 5% and 30%