> 1. I always thought that common vulnerabilities like Spectre were a problem with implementation (a certain way to do speculative execution) rather than with t

> 1. I always thought that common vulnerabilities like Spectre were a problem with implementation (a certain way to do speculative execution) rather than with the ISA. How is RISC-V ISA supposed to solve these kind of issues? They are implementation dependent but the architecure can help. It can provides guarantees about the ways in which speculation is limited and provide features to help software isolate speculation (if you download the arm ARM here: https://developer.arm.com/documentation/ddi0487/latest https://developer.arm.com/documentation/ddi0487/latest and look at section A2.2.1 which lists post v8.0 architecture additions you'll see a whole bunch of stuff around speculative execution for instance. The RISC-V ISA doesn't inherently resolve these issues, indeed I don't think it says anything on speculative execution, provide certain features and and guarantees to help isolate it (like arm does). > 2. I do not understand how openness of RISC-V makes it easier to find bugs in the ISA. For example, ARM ISA is fully described in a publicly available documents. What is stopping a security researcher from analysing the ARM specification and pointing out issues at the ISA level? Or do they mean that it's easier to analyse open-sources RISC-V implementations rather than ISA spec? I don't think the ISA openness helps you much or at all here, researchers analyse x86 and arm all the time and publish results. I think they're mixing up open ISA with open design and with the latter, yes it does make it easier for external parties to find security issues.