[EN/HE] SECURITY ALERT: Spectre and Meltdown Explained

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Tech world was shaken due to two critical CPU vulnerabilities known as Meltdown and Spectre. These vulnerabilities affect many modern CPUs on computers, smartphones, and other devices. Here's a high-level explanation of what you need to know:

What's going on?

Two exploits were recently discovered by researchers, these exploits enable unauthorized parties to steal sensitive data from basically almost every computer, smartphone, cloud storage etc. These exploits caused by a design flaw in modern CPUs. It not just Intel's problem, ARM and AMD CPUs proven to be at risk as well!. Sounds scary? It does.

How does these work?

Well, in order to understand how these exploits work, you need to know about a CPU process called Speculative Execution. Let's say that your CPU is an Uber driver, and he has a regular customer that orders a ride from 6 Pennsylvania Avenue every day at 8:00 AM. Our driver is smart. He speculates that the customer will order a cab from the same place and at the same time as always, and for a regular day, he's right and both the driver and the customer save time. But there's a possibility that the customer is sick, and therefore wouldn't order his regular Uber, the driver though, wouldn't guess and wait at his front door wasting his time.

So as the CPU. The CPU receives sets of instructions to follow, and there are some instructions that repeat and can be foreseen. So the CPU executes these foreseen instructions in order to save time and increase performance. Though when these instructions won't come, the CPU has wasted it's time, and he has to throw away the falsy data.

The data is thrown away to an unsecured shared data pool, where unauthorized parties could potentially access and even trick the CPU to waste sensitive data such as passwords to that pool.

What do I do?

First, relax. Many large companies such as Microsoft and Apple have already released software patches that close these exploits, though it comes at a price - you will probably notice a performance decrease because the speculative execution was affected by the patches.

So make sure you're running on the latest operating system for all of your devices, and stay tuned for near future updates to keep yourself secure.

This was for Meltdown, but for Spectre there is no way to get rid of this vulnerability for good unless buying a new, redesigned chip. Patches are solving only known exploits, one could possibly find a new way to walkaround them.

To summarize, keep your computer safe by updating all of the software.

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