In January 2018, three security vulnerabilities were made public that allow unauthorized users to bypass the hardware barrier between applications and kernel memory. These vulnerabilities all make use of speculative execution to perform side-channel information disclosure attacks. The first two vulnerabilities, CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017- 5715, are collectively known as Spectre, and allow user-level code to infer data from unauthorized memory; the third vulnerability, CVE-2017-5754, is known as Meltdown, and allows user-level code to infer the contents of kernel memory. In May 2018, a fourth variant was identified, CVE-2018-3639. This variant is another instantiation of a side-channel information disclosure attack. All of these identified vulnerabilities are variants of the same class of attacks but differ in the way that speculative execution is exploited. These vulnerabilities do not allow an external unauthorized party to gain access to a machine, but they could allow a party that has access to the system…

Critical flaws in the CPU that affects almost every device has been exploited by Meltdown and Spectre exposing nearly any data the computer processes.

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