Contributor Tony Nemo Posted January 4, 2018 Contributor Report Share Posted January 4, 2018 From The Economist: Fishy chips: computer security Technology firms are today working furiously to mitigate a pair of security flaws—discovered last year but only just made public—that affect many modern microprocessors. Given the PR-friendly names “Meltdown” and “Spectre”, they are caused by hardware features of almost all chips designed by Intel, AMD and ARM. Meltdown is more immediately dangerous: it affects only Intel’s chips, but can allow attackers access to information like passwords and encryption keys. Patches for popular operating systems such as Windows, Linux and MacOS are available, but because the flaw is so fundamental the way code runs must be drastically altered, causing computers to slow by up to 30%. Spectre is a more general take on the same idea, affecting chips from AMD, ARM and possibly other manufacturers. It is harder to exploit than Meltdown but also harder to fix: maybe only a hardware-level redesign of the chips in question could properly banish the vulnerability. That could take years. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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