Google’s Project Zero dropped a bombshell on the security community last week detailing CPU bugs affecting Intel, AMD, and ARM architectures going back as far as Pentium Pros. Yup, the chip with a mountain of cache and immortalized by Weird Al.
There are actually a few variants of the bugs, collectively named Meltdown and Spectre, detailed in the official bug report. Interestingly, the last line of the bug summary states:
All PoCs are written against specific processors and will likely require at least some adjustments before they can run in other environments, e.g. because of hardcoded timing tresholds[sic].
Indeed…
