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Meltdown & Spectre

meltdown spectre

On 3td Janury 2018, 3 new vulnerabilities have been identified, named “Meltdown” & “Spectre“, with the following CVE:

  • Variant 1: bounds check bypass (CVE-2017-2753) – Spectre
  • Variant 2: branch target injection (CVE-2017-5715) – Spectre
  • Variant 3: rogue data cache load (CVE-2017-5754) – Meltdown

 

Following is a link to official website where it’s possible to find every information and vulnerability details:

 

The discovered vulnerabilities allow to a potential malware to gain access to information processed by CPU, without having direct access to it; this is possible because these vulnerabilities allow reading permission to all data inside memory.

This means that potential malware can get hold of sensible data used by other host applications, such as passwords, documents, emails, etc…

Thiese vulnerabilities impact most modern CPUs present on market, included Intel Processors, ADM and ARM.

Actually there is no information concerning threats that use this vulnerability, even though some scripts are available online which demonstrate the effectiveness of the attack:

 

Following a scheme with the main differences between these 2 vulnerabilities:

meldown vs spectre

Source: https://danielmiessler.com/blog/simple-explanation-difference-meltdown-spectre/

HOW TO DEFEND YOURSELF

Nowadays key vendors have released patches and security bulletins to solve detected vulnerabilities:

 

REFERENCES