Software Alone Can’t Fix Spectre-Class Flaws

Decipher – Over the past year, chip makers, operating system vendors, and browser makers have released multiple software updates addressing the two broad classes of flaws—Meltdown and Spectre—which attackers can abuse to access protected areas of a processor’s memory. It is becoming more apparent that side channel attacks affect all microprocessors with the speculative execution feature (which is most of them!), making them more widespread than was originally believed.