#TOSSED OUT SPECTRE MELTDOWN CHIP FLAW SOFTWARE#

Processors execute instructions very quickly (one instruction every ~2 ns). As you may have guessed, these optimizations are in conflict with the sequential assumption of how the hardware in your computer executes instructions. Three of these techniques - caching, speculative execution, and branch prediction - are key to understanding Meltdown and Spectre. Computer engineers have found some amazingly clever ways to make computers fast. A modern Intel processor can execute ~300 billion instructions per second. The arrows flow from branch instructions to their possible destinations.

#TOSSED OUT SPECTRE MELTDOWN CHIP FLAW SOFTWARE#

These Intel x86-64 processor instructions in notepad.exe on Windows show what software looks like at the instruction level. This assumption is both sound and practical - it is equivalent to assuming that time travel is impossible - and it enables us to write functioning software. Almost all software assumes that a program’s instructions execute one after another. These instructions operate on data stored in memory (RAM) and also in a small table of special storage locations, called registers. Chrome, Photoshop, Notepad, Outlook, etc.) is a sequence of small individual instructions executed by your computer’s processor. Software is Instructions and DataĪll the software that you use (e.g. These are necessary to understand the flaws and why they work. Backgroundįirst, a lightning-fast overview of some important computer architecture concepts and some basic assumptions about hardware, software, and how they work together. The second part explains both variants of Spectre and discusses why we’re fixing these bugs now, even though they’ve been around for the past 25 years. The first part (what you are reading now) starts with a crash course in computer architecture to provide some background and explains what Meltdown actually does.

This article is divided into two parts for easier reading. Some technical details will be greatly simplified or omitted, but you’ll understand the core concepts and why Spectre and Meltdown are so important and technically interesting. This article is explains how the Meltdown and Spectre attacks work, but in a way that is accessible to people who have never taken a computer architecture course. We are going to try our best to fix that. Much has been written about the impact of Meltdown and Spectre, but there is scant detail about what these attacks are and how they work. In the past few weeks the details of two critical design flaws in modern processors were finally revealed to the public.

Tossed out spectre meltdown chip flaw