Reading up on Spectre and Meltdown attacks again, I don't get why they were hyped so much.
These are cache attacks that take advantage of the instruction pipeline processing implementation in addition to the cache implementation. So this is just another variation of the cache attacks. Why are these two attacks so hyped? Are they that much better? Do they make things easier?
- Previous attacks extracted AES keys and other sensitive material from processes.
- There have been Javascript based cache attacks before haven't they?
- Attacks have been made to work across cores before.
- Previous attacks also work on machines with multiple CPUs.
I understand these two variants make the attack much more easier and more controlled? Is that the reason?