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Questions tagged [spectre]

A side-channel vulnerability affecting modern microprocessors that perform branch prediction like Intel, AMD, ARM, Sparc and PowerPC allowing user processes to read memory belonging to other processes. Affects Linux, OS X, and Windows. Published in January 2018.

A side-channel vulnerability affecting modern microprocessors that perform branch prediction like Intel, AMD, Sparc V9, ARM and PowerPC CPUs allowing user processes to read memory belonging to other processes. Affects a wide range of OSes like Linux, OS X, AIX, Solaris and Windows. Published in January 2018.

The attack exploits speculative instruction execution that results from CPU branch prediction, coupled with traditional cache timing attacks in order to learn the contents of another process' memory space.

See full attack details at https://spectreattack.com

See our canonical question on this site at Meltdown and Spectre Attacks

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Meltdown and Spectre Attacks

Canonical question regarding the 2018 Jan. disclosed Meltdown and Spectre Attacks. Other identical or significantly similar questions should be closed as a duplicate of this one. Main concerns What is speculative execution and what does it…
M'vy
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Spectre/meltdown on a GPU

Are GPUs vulnerable to spectre/meltdown attacks, since they have most of what makes CPUs attackable? Is there any information in the VRAM, that would cause trouble if it was stolen?
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Is it true that meltdown and spectre were intended as debug tools?

I heard from a guy that's involved in low-level (assembler, C for drivers and OSes) programming, that meltdown and spectre weren't actually vulnerabilities discovered only so recently, but they were openly known as debug tools. It seems quite…
Antek
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Are new Intel CPUs vulnerable to Meltdown/Spectre?

Has Intel released any information about new processors? According to their advisory a number of processors are susceptible, but it says nothing about when new processors will be fixed. Also Meltdown and Spectre Vulnerabilities has no answers…
bitmask
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On Windows boxes, is patching for Spectre and Meltdown necessary?

From what I've read, Spectre and Meltdown each require rogue code to be running on a Windows box in order for attacks to take place. The thing is, once a box has rogue code running, it's already compromised. Given that the Microsoft patches for…
RockPaperLz- Mask it or Casket
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Which attacks are known that exploit the vulnerability known as Spectre?

As reported yesterday the Linux and Windows kernels will receive a security update pretty soon to close vulnerabilities that concern 'kernel memory leaking'. What exactly the design flaw is, that was probably identified at the end of 2017, is…
Tom K.
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How can SharedArrayBuffer be used for timing attacks?

Since this new class of attacks involves measuring precise time intervals, as a partial, short-term, mitigation we are disabling or reducing the precision of several time sources in Firefox. The precision of performance.now() has been reduced from…
curiousdannii
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Just how bad is Spectre?

Reading the whitepaper, it sounds like doom and gloom. The main webpage states “Spectre is harder to exploit than Meltdown, but it is also harder to mitigate. However, it is possible to prevent specific known exploits based on Spectre through…
Shelvacu
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Are new AMD processors more secure than Intel ones?

Since the discovery of Meltdown and Spectre, CPU security has been compromised and trust to the main manufacturers reduced, particularly Intel. 8 months later I wonder, what CPUs are more secure at this moment? Why? Have the patches achieved the…
user3770060
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Is anyone seeing a performance decrease after applying recent kernel patch fixing Meltdown and Spectre?

Our company has a lot of CPU intensive operations on our servers, so the performance decrease is a concern for the organization. We did the benchmarks, and it seems that performance is almost not affected. Initially it was stated that performance…
Jason Holcomb
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Was Meltdown/Spectre discovered in 1991 or 1995?

Wikipedia mentions this paper without going into details: The Intel 80x86 Processor Architecture: Pitfalls for Secure Systems: As mentioned in the preceding scenario, caches present potential for covert timing channels. Even without MSRs for…
chx
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Should Virtual Machines be patched for Meltdown and Spectre?

In Meltdown and Virtual Machines it was clarified that at least Spectre works crossing VMs. This of course means that the Hypervisor must be patched, but Should the VM OS be patched as well? Not being real CPUs it is not clear if they are directly…
Envite
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Are Meltdown and Spectre only exploitable with compiled code?

Is a system vulnerable where the only untrusted code is interpreted, JIT'd, or executed in a VM as bytecode? Does it depend on the language? Compiler? Or, do attacks depend on the attacker loading very specific, compiled instructions onto the…
svidgen
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How does Meltdown/Spectre impact Intel SGX?

I've been reading about Meltdown and Spectre today, and I'm wondering if they impact Intel SGX enclaves. Now, my understanding of Meltdown is somewhat hazy, but AFAICT it does not impact secure enclaves, because it relies on the kernel being mapped…
strugee
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How can CPU designers prevent information leaks from speculated execution?

We know about short-term measures to mitigate the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities in certain microprocessors where speculative execution has measurable effects on cache timings (mainly patches to microcode, operating systems and any…
Toby Speight
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