Virtually all of our personal devices and large infrastructure in the cloud are affected by two huge security problems.
The year could not start much worse in the field of security. Yesterday we talked about the design error in the microprocessors of Intel and its serious consequences, now we have known new data that indicate that the first security problem (named 'Meltdown') that can be solved with patches has an even more variant dangerous. This is Specter, a design flaw similar to Intel but is even more serious because it affects not only the processors of this manufacturer, but also the designs of AMD and ARM. The data we have now reveals something even more worrying: there is no solution to tackle a potential attack that exploits the vulnerability that Specter presents.
Meltdown: As the study reveals, this attack allows a program to access the memory (and secrets) of other programs and the operating system. "Meltdown breaks the fundamental isolation that exists between user applications and the operating system." The problem affects personal computers and the cloud infrastructure (this is the problem we were talking about yesterday and that affects, as far as is known, Intel processors). It is important to note that there are software patches to stop Meltdown attacks.
Specter: this problem goes further and "breaks the isolation between different applications". An attacker could use it to compromise the security of applications that have been perfectly programmed and "following the best practices", and in fact follow those practices ends up being ironically counterproductive, since it makes these programs more vulnerable to Specter. Unlike Meltdown, there are no software patches for Specter, which is harder to exploit than Meltdown, but also "harder to mitigate". Some software patches can prevent Specter attacks with known exploits that try to exploit this vulnerability.