New Spectre Flaws in Intel and AMD CPUs Affect Billions of Computers
May 06, 2021Ravie Lakshmanan
When Spectre, a class of critical vulnerabilities impacting modern processors, was publicly revealed in January 2018, the researchers behind the discovery said , "As it is not easy to fix, it will haunt us for quite some time," explaining the inspiration behind naming the speculative execution attacks. Indeed, it's been more than three years, and there is no end to Spectre in sight. A team of academics from the University of Virginia and University of California, San Diego, have discovered a new line of attack that bypasses all current Spectre protections built into the chips, potentially putting almost every system — desktops, laptops, cloud servers, and smartphones — once again at risk just as they were three years ago. The disclosure of Spectre and Meltdown opened a floodgates of sorts, what with endless variants of the attacks coming to light in the intervening years, even as chipmakers like Intel, ARM, and AMD have continually scrambled to incorpo
