Attempts to mitigate the landmark vulnerabilities have caused crashes, sudden reboots, and performance degradations. Here's the progress report on the Spectre and Meltdown solution.

The now-infamous Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities were first disclosed on January 4, 2018. The duo busted open the door on what is collectively known as "transient execution attacks," which have proven difficult to patch. Fundamentally, as Spectre and Meltdown are hardware-level vulnerabilities, patching around them in software is an order of magnitude more difficult than software vulnerabilities. The first round of patches focused primarily on inhibiting the exploitation of a specific variant, rather than the design flaw which enables these attacks...

Read more: A year after Spectre and Meltdown, how well do patches work? - TechRepublic

Posted By: Brink
24 Dec 2018