Mitigating Risk of Spectre and Meltdown Vulnerabilities
Wong Jin Kee · International Journal of Emerging Trends in Engineering Research · 2020
Speculative execution (Spectre) and Meltdown is a chip attempting to predict the future in order to improve the system performance which involves multiple logical branches, it will start working out the math for all those branches before the program even has to decide between them.Normally, it works together with caching which is to speed up the memory access by filled with the data that will need some and often the output of the speculative execution is stored here.The speculative execution and caching in the operating system improve the over-all system and operating system performance through the prediction of data or resources to be used and cache memory is for quick access of data or resources.The problem arises where this function could allow potential attackers to get access to data they should not have access by exploiting the Spectre attacks and Meltdown.Spectre attacks and meltdown open up the possibilities for dangerous attacks which involved the breach of security and confidentiality of the user.Various techniques and patches have been introduced to mitigating the Spectre attack and meltdown.In this paper, we present the view various variants of attack from the speculative execution with its mitigation techniques.