Spectre

Spectre refers to one of the two original transient execution CPU vulnerabilities (Meltdown), which involve microarchitectural timing side-channel attacks. These affect modern microprocessors that perform branch prediction and other forms of speculation. On most processors, the speculative execution resulting from a branch misprediction may leave observable side effects that reveal private data to attackers. For example, suppose the pattern of memory accesses performed by such speculative execution depends on private data. In that case, the resulting state of the data cache constitutes a side channel through which an attacker can extract information about the personal data using a timing attack. Spectre (security vulnerability)