![]() For the potential victims there is no way of knowing who will get executed first. Speculative execution can be compared to a reverse firing squad: One person has the gun and all the potential victims are lined up opposite. Even though the processor recovers and correctly completes its task, hackers can access confidential data while the processor is heading the wrong way. As a result an attacker may be able to read the content of the accessed memory, and thus potentially obtain sensitive data.Ī Spectre attack tricks the processor into executing instructions along the wrong path. Spectre-based attacks trick a program into accessing arbitrary locations in a program's memory space. What emerged in 2018 is that speculative execution opens the possibility of side-channel attacks. ![]() Speculative execution happens when a computer processor does some work it might need later, instead of waiting until it knows it definitely needs it. Before we explain that though, let's recap what Spectre is all about. New research has discovered Spectre attacks that bypass existing mitigations. Now it seems they may have to do it all over again. Since then, some of the world’s most talented computer scientists from industry and academia have worked on software patches and hardware defenses. Spectre is the name for a whole class of vulnerabilities discovered in January 2018 that affected huge numbers of modern computer processors that rely on a performance feature called speculative execution.
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