Meltdown can bypass the protections in place that separates the application from the operating system, allowing a program to read from the protected kernel memory, exposing the information. Spectre – the worse of two flaws – can access kernel memory or data from different applications. The first two variants are Spectre, the more dangerous of the two flaws, and the third variant is Meltdown. These exploits are categorized into three variants. Most vulnerabilities affect application software however, these vulnerabilities allow programs to steal data that is processed directly from the CPU, including passwords, encryption keys, emails, and any other data. Originally reported by Google’s Project Zero, Spectre and Meltdown fall outside the category of many other vulnerabilities seen recently. Known as Spectre and Meltdown, these exploits have alarming repercussions that could potentially affect and change an architecture that is deeply rooted in the lives of the technological world. We can only cross our fingers that these flaws are quickly patched, but once they are, it's up to you to make sure your devices have all been updated to the latest, most secure versions.On January 3rd, 2018, massive security flaws affecting nearly every computer were revealed. Unfortunately, researchers believe that vulnerabilities related to speculative execution will continue to surface far into the future. If you fall into these groups or want extra reassurance, read our guide on how to disable hyper-threading on macOS (for Mojave, High Sierra and Sierra). Most people won't need to take such extreme measures to protect their computers, but certain at-risk users, like government employees and business executives, might want want to take the precaution. But don't let that dissuade you from manually forcing the update.Īpple posted a support page explaining that the only way to fully mitigate the flaw is to disable hyper-threading, but that by doing so, you risk decreasing system performance by a staggering 40%, according to internal testing. Intel admitted that the security patches will impact CPU performance by up to 3% on consumer devices and up to 9% on data-center machines, and Google is disabling hyper-threading (a method that splits cores to increase performance) in Chrome OS 74 to mitigate the security risks. Read our guide on how to check for updates on your Mac or follow these steps to update your Windows 10 PC. But you're not out of danger until you've updated all of your Intel-based devices and their operating systems, which we strongly recommend doing right away. So have many makers of Linux distributions. Intel, Apple, Google and Microsoft have already issued patches to fix the flaws. "We hear anything that these components exchange." "It's kind of like we treat the CPU as a network of components, and we basically eavesdrop on the traffic between them," Cristiano Giuffrida, a researcher at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam who was part of the teams that discovered the MDS attacks, told Wired. The vulnerabilities also open the door for attackers to nab passwords, sensitive documents and encryption keys directly from a CPU. There's a technical breakdown of the four new attacks here.Īn alarming proof-of-concept video shows how the ZombieLoad exploit can be executed to see which websites a person is viewing in real time. In various ways, Spectre, Meltdown and these latest four flaws all permit attackers to read that data directly from the processor memory caches. The problem is that by carrying out operations before they are actually needed, the CPUs put the results of those operations - i.e., data - in their own short-term memory caches. The processor speculates, or tries to guess, which requests for operations it will receive in the near future (i.e, the next few milliseconds). The processor carries out, or executes, those operations before they are requested in order to save time when the requests are actually made. Like Spectre, Meltdown and several other flaws discovered since, these four new distinct attacks - called ZombieLoad, Fallout, RIDL and Store-to-Leak Forwarding - exploit weaknesses in a widely used feature called "speculative execution," which is used to help a processor predict what an app or program will need next in order to improve performance.
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