Because software is the weak link, not the hardware. It only costs Zerodium $200k for a VMware virtual machine escape [1] which would allow GB/s data exfiltrati

Because software is the weak link, not the hardware. It only costs Zerodium $200k for a VMware virtual machine escape [1] which would allow GB/s data exfiltration in contrast to a Spectre attack which only has data rates on the order of KB/s [2]. Finding zero-days in mass deployed, foundational software like operating systems or hypervisors only costs on the order of $100k-$1M and occurs routinely. In contrast, finding vulnerabilities in hardware that breach confidentiality (read-protection) or integrity (write-protection) are so rare that it is a media event when one is discovered every decade or so of aggressive searching. Hardware is literally 100x harder to successfully attack than software. We would be lucky if we had systems that were only as secure as their hardware since they would be 100x better than the status quo. [1] https://zerodium.com/program.html https://zerodium.com/program.html [2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-this-spectre-proof-of-concept-shows-how-dangerous-these-attacks-can-be/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-this-spectre-proof-of-c...