Indirect branch tracking protects against more than just Spectre. Its primary motivation is protecting control-flow integrity; i.e. mitigating vulnerabilities t

Indirect branch tracking protects against more than just Spectre. Its primary motivation is protecting control-flow integrity; i.e. mitigating vulnerabilities that involve corrupting a function pointer to get arbitrary code execution. CFI techniques have been around for a long time [0], though they have usually been implemented in software rather than hardware. This new Intel feature is a hardware implementation of these existing techniques, in order to reduce the performance impact. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control-flow_integrity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control-flow_integrity