Who is affected by Spectre and Meltdown?
IBM POWER9, POWER8, POWER7+, and POWER7 CPUs are partially vulnerable to Spectre and Meltdown, and have been patched by IBM. POWER4, 5, and 6 family CPUs are likewise partially vulnerable, though will not be patched, as those products have reached end of life.
What CPUs does Spectre affect?
ARM has reported that the majority of their processors are not vulnerable, and published a list of the specific processors that are affected by the Spectre vulnerability: Cortex-R7, Cortex-R8, Cortex-A8, Cortex-A9, Cortex-A15, Cortex-A17, Cortex-A57, Cortex-A72, Cortex-A73 and ARM Cortex-A75 cores.
How is Meltdown different from the Spectre vulnerability?
The Meltdown paper distinguishes the two vulnerabilities thus: “Meltdown is distinct from the Spectre Attacks in several ways, notably that Spectre requires tailoring to the victim process’s software environment, but applies more broadly to CPUs and is not mitigated by KAISER.”.
Are there any security issues with the Spectre next generation?
Spectre Next Generation — reportedly a new set of vulnerabilities in modern computer processors — could put your data at risk. Heise, a German online computer publication, reported on the security issue in March 2018. It said eight new vulnerabilities had been identified.
How does Spectre affect the performance of my computer?
Spectre patches have been reported to significantly slow down performance, especially on older computers; on the newer eighth-generation Core platforms, benchmark performance drops of 2–14 percent have been measured. On 18 January 2018, unwanted reboots, even for newer Intel chips, due to Meltdown and Spectre patches, were reported.
When was the disclosure of the Spectre vulnerability?
Since the disclosure of Spectre and Meltdown in January 2018, a lot of research on vulnerabilities related to speculative execution had been done. On 3 May 2018, eight additional Spectre-class flaws provisionally named Spectre-NG by c’t (German computer magazine) were reported affecting Intel and possibly AMD and ARM processors.