Spectre Explained - The Attack that took the world by surprise in 2018

Spectre is a side-channel attack that leverage speculative execution to get sensitive information stored in the CPU, intel back in 2018 struggling with this attack so much it had to disable this feature which slowed down the cpus significantly. let us discuss how this attack works From the paper “Spectre attacks involve inducing a victim to speculatively perform operations that would not occur during correct program execution and which leak the victim’s confidential information via a side channel to the adversary. This paper describes practical attacks that combine methodology from side channel attacks, fault attacks, and return-oriented programming that can read arbitrary memory from the victim’s process. More broadly, the paper shows that speculative execution implementations violate the security assumptions underpinning numerous software security mechanisms, including operating system process separation, containerization, just-in-time (JIT) compilation, and countermeasures to cache timing and side-channel attacks. These attacks represent a serious threat to actual systems since vulnerable speculative execution capabilities are found in microprocessors from Intel, AMD, and ARM that are used in billions of devices. While makeshift processor-specific countermeasures are possible in some cases, sound solutions will require fixes to processor designs as well as updates to instruction set architectures (ISAs) to give hardware architects and software developers a common understanding as to what computation state CPU implementations are (and are not) permitted to leak.” Intro 0:00 How CPU Cache works 1:00 Spectre Explained 3:00 https://spectreattack.com/spectre.pdf 🎙️Listen to the Backend Engineering Podcast https://husseinnasser.com/podcast 🏭 Backend Engineering Videos https://backend.husseinnasser.com 💾 Database Engineering Videos    • Database Engineering   🏰 Load Balancing and Proxies Videos    • Proxies   🏛️ Software Archtiecture Videos    • Software Architecture   📩 Messaging Systems    • Message Queues & PubSub Systems   Become a Member    / @hnasr   Support me on PayPal https://bit.ly/33ENps4 Stay Awesome, Hussein