“Meltdown” and “Spectre”: What Streamers should know

If you haven’t heard yet, many parties have identified a major security flaw with the way processors… well, process. There is a lot of information out there, and I am going to spell it out for you, and help you figure out what it is you need to do to protect yourself.

The security flaw was discovered recently and kept under wraps with intent to release information after patches were almost completed or already launched, but the masses discovered and brought it to light a couple weeks early. This flaw was found to expose normally secured information to programs that do not have authorization to the specified data. This allows a malicious program to call processes it doesn’t have access to, and while the processor will find it doesn’t have access, the information is temporarily loaded to cache before being removed. This data can be read in that brief moment. It could be anything from your encrypted Nana’s recipe for cookies to your credit card or personal pictures you probably don’t want out in the internet.

The way processors work is through speculative computing. For example, you get on a train. That train can have 2 destinations. The processor, trying to find out which destination you are going to, runs them both at the same time. Once it figures it out, the train that is wrong disappears. It is supposed to not touch anything, but it actually does for a brief second. And its that brief second that allows someone else to see that train you were not on and obtain some information off of it.

Now, how to protect yourself. Patches are already rolling out for these issues. Get these patches as soon as possible. While speculation was there would be a drop in processing power, this is limited to kernel based applications. Your broadcasting software and your games are good to go. There can be some issues seen in connections to different parts of the globe as data-centers get the security patch, but hopefully they are planning accordingly and are prepared.
If you do not want to get the patch due to your current usage of kernel applications (this is very few people, and you would know if you are one of them), then there are a few things you can do. This also applies to everyone as well, for general protection. This flaw is only exploitable through a program running on your computer. Think twice (or thrice) about clicking a link you don’t recognize. Ask yourself, should you really download this? Another precaution is to disable Javascript in your browser. Preventing the malicious software getting access to your machine nullifies the need for a patch, but getting the patch is the safest way to avoid exploitation.

I hope you learned something from this, I sure did through my research. Keep streaming everyone!