Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities
Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities Recently, two critical vulnerabilities were discovered in modern processors. Dubbed "Meltdown and Spectre", these processor chip vulnerabilities are found on personal computers, mobile devices, and in the cloud. What is Meltdown Meltdown exploits a flaw in out-of-order execution, a performance feature found in many modern processor chips. The researchers who discovered it have confirmed that it affects every Intel processor since 1995 (with the exception of pre-2013 Intel Itanium and Intel Atom processors). However, they added that it remains unclear whether ARM and AMD processors are also affected by the vulnerability. If successfully exploited, an attacker can obtain a copy of the entire kernel address space, including any mapped physical memory, in other words, any data stored in memory at the time of the attack. What is…