Meltdown, Spectre chip vulnerabilities: What you need to know
A duo of vulnerabilities is forcing chipmakers to rethink the trade-offs they’ve made between performance and security. Here’s what you need to know.
Q: What are Meltdown and Spectre?
Unlike other ominously named phenomena in computer security, Meltdown and Spectre are neither viruses nor security breaches. Instead, they’re ways of exploiting chip vulnerabilities that allow an attacker to secretly read the contents of a computer’s memory, including passwords and other sensitive data.
Meltdown was discovered and reported last
