[vicaya]

TLDR: two side-channel info leak attacks on CPUs: Meltdown that appears to affect Intel and latest ARM64 (Cortex-A75), and Spectre that was shown to affect Intel, older AMD and ARM64 and theoretically newer AMD processors.

Meltdown is more severe with read privilege escalation (javascript in browser could read kernel memory!), which has a kernel patch (KPTI) that can slow down many workloads by 30%.

Spectre also allows a user process to read memory of other processes/containers and potentially kernel, which was shown to work on Intel and ARM64 because their predictable branch prediction impl (Tomasulo). Newer AMD (Ryzen and Epyc) employs a hardware neural network for branch prediction, which is much less predictable but still theoretically possible to exploit. This is probably not the first time that the opacity of a neural network helped security :)