Over the past few days you may have heard some news about the new security flaws-“Spectre” and “Meltdown”- affecting the processors on computers, mobile phones & tablets and in the cloud. Current CPU chips from Intel,
Over the past few days you may have heard some news about the new security flaws-“Spectre” and “Meltdown”- affecting the processors on computers, mobile phones & tablets and in the cloud. Current CPU chips from Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, ARM & others have this flaw, which means that these risks cover virtually every computing device. Windows, Linux & Apple products are all affected, as well as embedded processors relying on these CPU chips. This vulnerability is so significant that the US Dept. of Homeland Security has issued an alert.
This issue is caused by a flaw in the fundamental design of these chips called “speculative processing”, which is used to accelerate them. Estimating next steps in an operation & speculatively processing them does indeed speed up these chips (& the computers that run them). However, it also allows a hacker to