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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday May 23 2018, @06:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the your-computer-is-not-a-fast-PDP-11 dept.

Very interesting article at the IEEE ACM by David Chisnall.

In the wake of the recent Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, it's worth spending some time looking at root causes. Both of these vulnerabilities involved processors speculatively executing instructions past some kind of access check and allowing the attacker to observe the results via a side channel. The features that led to these vulnerabilities, along with several others, were added to let C programmers continue to believe they were programming in a low-level language, when this hasn't been the case for decades.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by crafoo on Wednesday May 23 2018, @08:17PM

    by crafoo (6639) on Wednesday May 23 2018, @08:17PM (#683258)

    Thank you. You said this much better than I did. It was really quite an impressive trick, taking control of the hardware away from the owner without many even noticing what was going on. But they did it, and here we are.

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