Devastating Speculative Execution Intel CPU Bug

[SteelCrysis]

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/new-var...36533.html

The Meltdown/Spectre vulnerabilities break the principle of speculative execution being undetectable to software by modifying shared caches in a way that persists and is detectable across software process boundaries. What the researchers discovered is that, because certain caches might be partially mirrored across cores, the effects of speculative execution occurring on one core can be detectable on another core. Test cases exploiting this principle created by the researchers were able to recover hidden data at 99.95% accuracy. By comparison, their test cases of a traditional Spectre exploit only reached 97.9% accuracy.

Before you get too alarmed, the researchers said that current software-based Meltdown/Spectre mitigations seem successful in blocking their new exploits. However, these exploits will likely need their own distinct fix, different from those for traditional Spectre, if they are to be mitigated in hardware. It looks like Intel and AMD will have their work cut out for them in their next generation of CPUs.