This affects a huge number of cloud service providers and personal computer and device users. Meltdown allows an attacker to read memory that they should not have access to in other processes, other virtual machines on the same system and across various other permission boundaries.
#Specter meltdown software#
In other words, it is a vulnerability in chip hardware that is exploitable on any system, no matter what operating system it is running, no matter whether the software on the system has a vulnerability or not. The attack is independent of operating system and does not rely on any software vulnerabilities. It exploits a CPU performance optimization known as ‘out-of-order execution’ to read arbitrary kernel memory locations. Meltdown is the first of the two vulnerabilities that GPZ disclosed. Intel has been accused of downplaying the seriousness of the vulnerability, both in terms of how badly Intel CPUs are affected and the negative effects of these vulnerabilities.ĪRM also released an official statement, as did AMD. Intel’s official statement says “ Contrary to some reports, any performance impacts are workload-dependent, and, for the average computer user, should not be significant and will be mitigated over time.” Some news sources are claiming up to 30% performance impact, while more authoritative sources indicate this number is exaggerated. The security fixes may have a performance impact. Spectre Mirror and Meltdown Mirror.īoth of these vulnerabilities stem from performance optimizations in CPUs.
#Specter meltdown pdf#
I am providing mirrored copies of both PDF papers on our site because at the time of writing, both source websites were down, probably due to excess traffic. You can find the academic paper on Spectre on this page (PDF) and the paper on Meltdown on this page (also PDF). They have named the flaws Spectre and Meltdown. Research associated with the security flaws was published on the Google Project Zero blog. Most information was finally disclosed by the researchers involved yesterday, January 3rd. Disclosure was under embargo until next week, but public speculation on kernel patches that fix this issue lead to early disclosure starting on January 1st, 2018. The flaws were first reported confidentially by researchers to CPU makers Intel, AMD and ARM on June 1st, 2017. The vulnerabilities were discovered by collaborating researchers at University of Pennsylvania, University of Maryland, Graz University of Technology, Cyberus Technology, Rambus Cryptography Research Division, University of Adelaide and Data61 along with researchers at GPZ. This affects any software running on Intel chips, no matter the operating system or vendor. This affects every Intel processor since 1995 that implements out-of-order execution, except Itanium, and the Atom before 2013. It is early in the year, but this may be the most important and impactful security vulnerability in 2018.
Yesterday they announced a set of flaws in CPU architectures that create two kinds of vulnerabilities.
Google’s Project Zero (GPZ) is a think tank of leading edge security researchers who have established a track record of ground breaking research. This entry was posted in Security on by Mark Maunder The Impact of Meltdown & Spectre Vulnerabilities
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