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#140
Last edited by andyouf; 22 Aug 2018 at 04:53.
Last edited by andyouf; 22 Aug 2018 at 04:53.
From https://meltdownattack.com Q&A
What does the question mean?Has Meltdown or Spectre been abused in the wild?
We don't know.
Has this exploit been successfully exploited?
Answer: With current techniques it is impossible to tell. Spectre is well-named; as well as being named after Speculative Execution, it is a ghost as perfectly legal (and by that I mean non-viral) code is used to 'snoop' across memory boundaries or into other processes. This code can be program code or most likely Javascript; stuff like 'Site Isolation' and 'Kernel Page Table Isolation' give you some idea of the methods used to mitigate. Instructions like LFENCE, programming techniques such as 'retpoline' (portmanteau of return & trampoline) and 'timer-fuzzing' also give an idea of what is occuring.
Another analogy is basically a man reading a newspaper and he sees you reading over his shoulder so he lifts the adjacent page to stop you seeing what he's reading. Basically you know he's reading pages 4 & 5 by the fact you get to read page 3 for free as long as he tries to shield it from you. When he leaves his seat and discards the paper on the seat or in the trash, you get the gold / dirt on pages 4 & 5.
Oh okay I didn't get the term at all. I read up on speculative execution, still don't quite get how it works but it seems great (except for the vulnerability part). The newspaper analogy I'm guessing is saying that content I viewed is discarded to memory to be viewed by a malicious user.
I got this update this morning after manually running a Windows Update check. WU ran an auto check earlier today and it wasn't there. A lot of people don't manually check WU for updates and will be missing this. One would think MS would make sure something this important would show up automatically.
It seems everyone is getting this one or the one below for Windows 10 v1803.
KB4346084 Intel microcode updates for Windows 10 v1803 - August 21 - Windows 10 Forums
Kinda of dumb(redundant) to have something running in memory the whole time, when BIOS already is taking care of it.
I have enough memory, but, others sure don't.