Spectre-cular, Meltdown of intel Chips.

What is the News?

Last week advisories regarding the 2 critical bugs related to computer processors were revealed. What these bugs did was to take the advantage of a modern processor which was implemented for making computers work extremely fast. If you still don’t know what the bug is about don’t worry, even the professionals in the industry are confused about it. Below is the explanation of the feature the exploit is taking advantage of.

What is this bug All About?

Every modern processor has been built to work extremely fast so that user don’t have to wait for anything to load. The primary philosophy here used is prefetching the data user is likely to demand by predicting the pattern of the user. This is done by a method known as Branch prediction which predicts what user is going to do in applications based on the past behavior it analyses the data and provides the users with results. This saves a lot of processor time and hence improves the efficiency.

The Spectre and meltdown attack takes advantage of this. So whenever the CPU starts executing the prediction that it has learned out of the previous patterns, the attacker tricks the CPU and it receives the wrong branch. Now, to improve the prediction CPU again has to create predictions based on the past behavior patterns of the user. So taking advantage of this loop-hole, the code will access the memory and the information which shouldn’t have been allowed in the first place.

What is the impact?

The Attacks Spectre and meltdown possess abilities to exfiltrate sensitive information. Local user can view arbitary virtual memory contents on the target CPU device. Any user can run a specially crafted software on the system causing the CPU to read memory from a CPU cache before asynchronous permission check occurs. These 2 attacks impact the intel processor lines ranging from Celeron, Core series, xenon series etc. not only intel but AMD, ARM systems are also affected by it.

If you are more into technical side then fret not, these attacks are covered in specific CVE’s database. the Spectre attacks uses a bound check bypass that is covered in CVE-2017–5753 and branch target injections covered in CVE-2017–5715. Where as, Meltdown consists a rogue data cache load, which is covered in CVE-2017–5754. Attackers are able to read system memory that is not accessible by a program. Considering these attacks, Meltdown is faster than Spectre thanks to the low size.

How can you protect yourself?

Currently each and every vendor be it Hardware/software are behind these 2 bugs. From Microsoft to Apple, Google to Cisco etc. are releasing patches for these vulnerabilities and trying to fix it as soon as possible. Many companies have now released a bug fix from their end, so if you haven’t checked for it do check for those fixes.

Is the update really helpful?

There has been cases where the bug fixes were implemented and the computer systems were working fine. But there are many controversies regarding the same as well. Microsoft said in one its statement that the new updates would affect the performances of the CPU’s by up to 30%. Now that sounds shocking right? it’s not just you but everyone in the industry are shocked by it. This updates not only slows the personal computers but also affects the servers that are running all your social media, corporate stuffs, cloud computations etc. This slow down is universal, i.e, Be it Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh, everyone’s beloved Linux or their server counter part OS, are effected by it.

So What to do?

It would advisable to first check about the bug fixes in the Vendor’s forum pages, whether the update doesn’t affect any other functionality of the system. If there are no problems reported then you should update the system with the bug fixes released.