Spectre (security vulnerability)
Spectre (vulnerabilidad)
- Date
- 2017 · confidence high
- Place
- Graz, Austria
- Credited to
- Paul Kocher and independent research teams
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What was discovered
A family of side-channel vulnerabilities in microprocessors that exploits speculative execution to read private data via cache access patterns. It affects virtually all modern processors and forced a rethink of CPU architecture.
Independently discovered in 2017 by several teams (Paul Kocher, Google Project Zero, Graz University of Technology, among others) and disclosed publicly in January 2018.
What it led to
- software mitigation patches across operating systems and browsers
- redesign of speculative execution in new processor generations
- a surge in hardware side-channel attack research