Company
Date Published
Jan. 8, 2018
Author
John Graham-Cumming
Word count
1402
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Two significant computer bugs named Meltdown and Spectre were announced in January 2018. These vulnerabilities exploit technical systems implemented by modern CPUs to make computers fast, such as branch prediction and speculative execution. The core of these attacks is the ability to exfiltrate information from speculatively executed code through a side channel known as a cache. Meltdown and Spectre can be used to dump the entire memory of a computer, potentially exposing sensitive data like passwords and cryptographic secrets.