Boffins offer to make speculative execution great again with Spectre-Meltdown CPU fix
A group of computer science researchers has proposed a way to overcome the security risk posed by speculative execution, the data processing technique behind the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities.
In a paper distributed this week through the ArXiv preprint server, "SafeSpec: Banishing the Spectre of a Meltdown with Leakage-Free Speculation," computer scientists from University of California, Riverside, College of William and Mary and Binghamton University describe a way to isolate the artifacts produced by speculative execution so that they can't be used to glean privileged data.
SafeSpec is "a design principle where speculative state is stored in temporary structures that are not accessible by committed instructions," the paper – co-authored by Khaled N. Khasawneh, Esmaeil Mohammadian Koruyeh, Chengyu Song, Dmitry Evtyushkin, Dmitry Ponomarev, and Nael Abu-Ghazaleh – explains.
