On the Spectre and Meltdown Processor Security Vulnerabilities

This paper first reviews the Spectre and Meltdown processor security vulnerabilities that were revealed during January–October 2018 and that allow the extraction of protected information from billions of processors in large and small systems. It then discusses short-term mitigation actions and speculates on the longer term implications to computer software and hardware. This paper expands from a keynote/panel by the authors at IEEE Hot Chips 2018.