In early 2018, Intel reported that it would redesign its CPUs to help protect against the Spectre and related Meltdown vulnerabilities (especially, Spectre variant 2 and Meltdown, but not Spectre variant 1). A website can read data stored in the browser for another website, or the browser's memory itself. JIT engines used for JavaScript were found to be vulnerable.

Two Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures IDs related to Spectre, CVE- 2017-5753 (bounds check bypass, Spectre-V1, Spectre 1.0) and CVE- 2017-5715 (branch target injection, Spectre-V2), have been issued. For example, if the pattern of memory accesses performed by such speculative execution depends on private data, the resulting state of the data cache constitutes a side channel through which an attacker may be able to extract information about the private data using a timing attack. On most processors, the speculative execution resulting from a branch misprediction may leave observable side effects that may reveal private data to attackers. These affect modern microprocessors that perform branch prediction and other forms of speculation. Spectre refers to one of the two original transient execution CPU vulnerabilities (the other being Meltdown), which involve microarchitectural timing side-channel attacks. A logo created for the vulnerability, featuring a ghost with a branchĪll pre-2019 microprocessors that use branch prediction

Spectre instaling