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, hardcoding values is never a good idea as it often leads to inflexible code. This post explores how we might learn these thresholds with the help of deep learning. But first, let’s review how Spectre works. …
