Meltdown and Spectre are security flaws that gained widespread media coverage in the first days of 2018. Contrary to other security bugs these flaws are
- hardware, not software based<(/li>
- the direct consequence of years of performance improvements
- extremely widespread because they affect (nearly all) computer systems, including mobile phones
- difficult to patch
This talk fills the gap between "Intel caused a terrible security bug. Everybody panic!" and "By priming the BPU of the CPU a malicious process can read out of bounds memory via speculative code execution".
This talk comes with a side order on "Understanding CPU architecture" and "Managing security vulnerabilities".