EurekAlert April 30, 2021
In 2018, industry and academic researchers revealed a potentially devastating hardware flaw, they called Spectre, which was built into modern computer processors that get their speed from a technique called “speculative execution”. A Spectre attack tricks the processor into executing instructions along the wrong path. Even though the processor recovers and correctly completes its task, hackers can access confidential data while the processor is heading the wrong way. Researchers at the University of Virginia has uncovered a line of attack that breaks all Spectre defenses, meaning that billions of computers and other devices across the globe are just as vulnerable today as they were when Spectre was first announced. The team reported its discovery to international chip makers in April and will present the new challenge at a worldwide computing architecture conference in June…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ
By breaking up execution into stages, a pipeline completes instructions at a higher rate than if each instruction had to finish before the next began. Credit: IEEE Spectrum, February 28, 2019.Â