Thank you, that was a succinct explanation of the difference between AMD/Intel and the order of speculation and protected memory access check for the Meltdown a

Thank you, that was a succinct explanation of the difference between AMD/Intel and the order of speculation and protected memory access check for the Meltdown attack, and makes it easier to understand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerability) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerabili... I see now why the Spectre attack is so serious (reading out of bounds within the same process memory). I feel like there may be ways to catch unallocated memory access similarly to how protected memory works. But, that wouldn't help reads from allocated memory in runtime environments like for Javascript (where separate scripts in the same process space aren't meant to see each other's data). This is clearer to me now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerability) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerabilit... Going forward, we may have to assume that security is only possible with true process isolation. For example this might put pressure on OSs to fix their slow context switching implementations to encourage the use of processes instead of threads. Beyond that, I can't see any easy way to fix the situation and am highly skeptical of things like compiler fixes, because there will likely always be another way to abuse various instructions to read outside memory boundaries.