Exploiting Spectre over the Internet

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/03/exploiting-spectre-over-the-internet.html

7 6 5 years ago

I’m trying to understand how the attack was successful on Apple M1 ARM CPUs. I’ll keep reading, but if anyone has any insights please share!

ddworken2• 5 years ago

Fundamentally, Spectre is a class of bugs that arises from how modern CPUs are designed. It isn't just an Intel bug, an x86 bug, or a JS bug. CPUs that perform speculative execution after a branch prediction are generally expected to be vulnerable. And as I understand it (I'm a security person, not a CPU designer) branch prediction is a very important optimization that is responsible for a lot of the advances in CPU performance over the years. So if CPU designers dropped branch prediction, they'd be trading off a lot of speed for security.

cyberlurker2• 5 years ago

Thanks, that seems to align with what I understand too. But I thought perhaps a new architecture, like M1, would have had some additional protection.

Exploiting Spectre over the Internet

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